X

"Maxwelton's braes are bonnie, where early fa's the dew,And it's there that Annie Laurie gi'ed me her promise true."

"But it's a white woman," said the lady in the yellow lava-lava, who had expected only the islanders to shock her, "a white woman gone native! How disgustin'!"

"Ssh!" said somebody else, "she's going to give us more."

The old witch hardly seemed conscious of their presence now. The slumbering sea of music within her was breaking up the ice which had sealed and silenced it for so long. She nodded at them, with shining eyes, and muttered thickly, an almost childlike boast:

"Oh, but I could do better than that once. My fingers are stiff. Wait!"

She went into her hut, and returned with the violin. Tremblingly, she opened a little packet of violin strings.

"It's my last," she said. "I've kept it very carefully; but it won't be as good as it used to be."

The throng watched her breathlessly, as she made ready, and the trade-wind hushed itself to sleep among the palms.

"When I was in Europe last," she said, "it seemed to me there was darkness coming. People had forgotten the meaning of music like this. They wanted discord and blood and wickedness. I didn't understand it. But you could see it coming everywhere. Horrible pictures. Women like snakes. Books like lumps of poison. Hatred everywhere. Even the musicians hated each other; and if they thought any one had genius, O ever so little of that—do you know—I think they wanted to kill. Of course, I chose wrong. I ought to have stayed and fought them. It's too late now. But you know the meaning of this? It's the cry over the lost city, before the windows were darkened and the daughters of music brought low."

"Crazy as a loon!" whispered the lady in the yellow lava-lava.

The old woman stood upright in the shadow of a tall palm-tree, a shadow that spread round her on the milk-white beach like a purple star. Then her violin began to speak, began to cry, through the great simple melody of theLargoof Handel, like the soul of an outcast angel.

At the climax of its infinite compassion, two strings snapped in quick succession, and she sank to the ground with a sob, hugging the violin to her breast, as if it were a child.

"That was the last," she said.

They saw her head fall over on her shoulder, as she lay back against the stem of the palm, an old, old woman asleep in the deep heart of its purple star of shadow; and they knew, instinctively, even before the Captain of thePearladvanced to make quite sure, that it was indeed the last.

"I don't know about three acres and a cow, but every man ought to have his garden. That's the way I look at it," said the old fisherman, picking up another yard of the brown net that lay across his knees. "There's gardens that you see, and gardens that you don't see. There's gardens all shut in with hedges, prickly hedges that 'ull tear your hand if you try to make a spy-hole in them; and some that you wouldn't know was there at all—invisible gardens, like the ones that Cap'n Ellis used to talk about.

"I never followed him rightly; for I supposed he meant the garden of the heart, the same as the sentimental song; but he hadn't any use for that song, so he told me. My wife sent it to him for a Christmas present, thinking it would please him; and he used it for pipe-lights. The words was very pretty, I thought, and very appropriate to his feelings:

'Ef I should plant a little seed of love,In the garden of your heart.

That's how it went. But he didn't like it.

"Then there's other gardens that every one can see, both market-gardens and flower-gardens. Cap'n Ellis told me he knew a man once that wore a cauliflower in his buttonhole, whenever he went to chapel, and thought it was a rose. Leastways, he thought that every one else thought it was a rose. Kind of an orstrich he must have been. But that wasn't the way with Cap'n Ellis. Every one could seehisgarden, though he had a nice big hedge round three sides of it, and it wasn't more than three-quarters of an acre. Right on the edge of the white chalk coast it was; and his little six-room cottage looked like a piece of the white chalk itself.

"But he was a queer old chap, and he always would have it that nobody could really see his garden. I used to take him a few mackerel occasionally—he liked 'em for his supper—and he'd walk in his garden with me for half an hour at a time. Then, just as I'd be going he'd give a little smile and say, 'Well, you haven't seen my garden yet! You must come again.'

"'Haven't seen your garden,' I'd say. 'I've been looking at it this half hour an' more!'

"'Once upon a time, there was a man that couldn't see a joke,' he'd say. Then he'd go off chuckling, and swinging his mackerel against the hollyhocks.

"Funny little old chap he was, with a pinched white face, and a long nose, and big gray eyes, and fluffy white hair for all the world like swans' down. But he'd been a good seaman in his day.

"He'd sit there, in his porch, with his spyglass to his eye, looking out over his garden at the ships as they went up and down the Channel. Then he'd lower his glass a little to look at the butterflies, fluttering like little white sails over the clumps of thrift at the edge of the cliff, and settling on the little pink flowers. Very pretty they was too. He planted them there at the end of his garden, which ran straight down from his cottage to the edge of the cliff. He said his wife liked to see them nodding their pink heads against the blue sea, in the old days, when she was waiting for him to come home from one of his voyages. 'Pink and blue,' he says, 'is a very pretty combination.' They matched her eyes and cheeks, too, as I've been told. But she's been dead now for twenty-five years or more.

"He had just one little winding path through the garden to the edge of the cliff; an' all the rest, at the right time of the year, was flowers. He'd planted a little copse of fir trees to the west of it, so as to shelter the flowers; and every one laughed at him for doing it. The sea encroaches a good many yards along this coast every year, and the cliffs were crumbling away with every tide. The neighbors told him that, if he wanted a flower-garden, he'd better move inland.

"'It was a quarter of a mile inland,' he says, 'when Polly and me first came to live here; and it hasn't touched my garden yet. It never will touch it,' he says, 'not while I'm alive. There are good break-waters down below, and it will last me my time. Perhaps the trees won't grow to their full height, but I shan't be here to see,' he says, 'and it's not the trees I'm thinking about. It's the garden. They don't have to be very tall to shelter my garden. As for the sea,' he says, 'it's my window, mybay-window, and I hope you see the joke. If I was inland, with four hedges around my garden, instead of three,' he says, 'it would be like living in a house without a window. Three hedges and a big blue bay-window, that's the garden for me,' he says.

"And so he planted it full of every kind of flowers that he could grow. He had sweet Williams, and larkspurs, and old man's beard, and lavender, and gilly-flowers, and a lot of them old-fashioned sweet-smelling flowers, with names that he used to say were like church-bells at evening, in the old villages, out of reach of the railway-lines.

"And they all had a meaning to him which others didn't know. You might walk with him for a whole summer's afternoon in his garden, but it seemed as if his flowers kept the sweetest part of their scents for old Cap'n Ellis. He'd pick one of them aromatic leaves, and roll it in his fingers, and put it to his nose and say 'Ah,' like as if he was talking to his dead sweetheart.

"'It's a strange thing,' he'd say, 'but when she was alive, I was away at sea for fully three parts of the year. We always talked of the time when I'd retire from the sea. We thought we'd settle down together in our garden and watch the ships. But, when that time came, it was her turn to go away, and it's my turn to wait. But there's a garden where we meet,' he'd say, 'and that's the garden you've never seen.'

"There was one little patch, on the warmest and most sheltered side that he called his wife's garden; and it was this that I thought he meant. It was just about as big as her grave, and he had little clusters of her favorite flowers there—rosemary, and pansies and Canterbury bells, and her nameRuth, done very neat and pretty in Sussex violets. It came up every year in April, like as if the garden was remembering.

"Parson considered that Cap'n Ellis was a very interesting man.

"'He's quite a philosopher,' he said to me one day; and I suppose that was why the old chap talked so queer at times.

"One morning, after the war broke out, I'd taken some mackerel up to Cap'n Ellis.

"'Are you quite sure they're fresh,' he said, the same as he always did, though they were always a free gift to him. But he meant no offense.

"'Fresh as your own lavender,' I says, and then we laughs as usual, and sat down to look at the ships, wondering whether they were transports, or Red Cross, or men-of-war, as they lay along the horizon. Sometimes we'd see an air-plane. They used to buzz up and down that coast all day; and Cap'n Ellis would begin comparing it through his glass with the dragon flies that flickered over his gilly-flowers. There was a southwest wind blowing in from the sea over his garden, and it brought us big puffs of scent from the flowers.

"'Hour after hour,' he says, 'day after day, sometimes for weeks I've known the southwest wind to blow like that. It's the wind that wrecked the Armada,' he says, 'and, though it comes gently to my garden, you'd think it would blow all the scents out of the flowers in a few minutes. But it don't,' he says. 'The more the wind blows, the more sweetness they give out,' he says. 'Have you ever considered,' he says, 'how one little clump of wild thyme will go on pouring its heart out on the wind? Where does it all come from?'

"I was always a bit awkward when questions like that were put to me; so—just to turn him off like—I says 'Consider the lilies of the field.'

"'Ah,' he says, turning to me with his eyes shining. 'That's the way to look at it.' I heard him murmuring another text under his breath, 'Come, thou south, and blow upon my garden.' And he shook hands with me when I said good-bye, as if I'd shown him my feelings, which made me feel I wasn't treating him right, for I'd only said the first thing that came into my mind, owing to my awkwardness at such times.

"Well, it was always disturbing me to think what might happen to Cap'n Ellis, if one day he should find his garden slipping away to the beach. It overhung quite a little already; and there had been one or two big falls of chalk a few hundred yards away. Some said that the guns at sea were shaking down the loose boulders.

"Of course, he was an old man now, three score years and ten, at least; and my own belief was that if his garden went, he would go with it. The parish council was very anxious to save a long strip of the cliff adjoining his garden, because it was their property; and they'd been building a stone wall along the beach below to protect it from the high tide. But they were going to stop short of Cap'n Ellis's property, because of the expense, and he couldn't afford to do it himself. A few of us got together in thePloughand tried to work out a plan of carrying on the wall, by mistake, about fifteen feet further, which was all it needed. We'd got the foreman on our side, and it looked as if we should get it done at the council's expense after all, which was hardly honest, no doubt, in a manner of speaking, though Cap'n Ellis knew nothing about it.

"But the end came in a way that no wall could have prevented, though it proved we were right about the old man having set his heart in that garden. David Copper, the shepherd, saw the whole thing. It happened about seven o'clock of a fine summer morning, when the downs were all laid out in little square patches, here a patch of red clover, and there a patch of yellow mustard, for all the world like a crazy quilt, only made of flowers, and smelling like Eden garden itself for the dew upon them.

"It was all still and blue in the sky, and the larks going up around the dew-ponds and bursting their pretty little hearts for joy that they was alive, when, just as if the shadow of a hawk had touched them, they all wheeled off and dropped silent.

"Pretty soon, there was a whirring along the coast, and one of them air-planes came up, shining like silver in the morning sun. Copper didn't pay much attention to it at first, for it looked just as peaceable as any of our own, which he thought it was. Then he sees a flash, in the middle of Cap'n Ellis's garden, and the overhung piece, where the little clumps of thrift were, goes rumbling down to the beach, like as if a big bag of flour had been emptied over the side. The air-plane circled overhead, and Copper thinks it was trying to hit the coast-guard station, which was only a few score yards away, though nobody was there that morning but the coast-guard's wife, and the old black figurehead in front of it, and there never was any guns there at any time.

"The next thing Copper saw was Cap'n Ellis running out into what was left of his garden, with his night-shirt flapping around him, for all the world like a little white sea-swallow. He runs down with his arms out, as if he was trying to catch hold of his garden an' save it. Copper says he never knew whether the old man would have gone over the edge of the cliff or not. He thinks he would, for he was running wildly. But before he reached the edge there was another flash and, when the smoke had cleared, there was no garden or cottage or Cap'n Ellis at all, but just another big bite taken out of the white chalk coast.

"We found him under about fifteen ton of it down on the beach. The curious thing was that he was all swathed and shrouded from head to foot in the flowers of his garden. They'd been twisted all around him, lavender, and gilly-flowers, and hollyhocks, so that you'd think they were trying to shield him from harm. P'raps they've all gone with him to one of them invisible gardens he used to talk about, where he was going to meet his dead sweetheart.

"They buried him on the sunny side of the churchyard. You can see a bit of blue sea between the yew trees from where he lies, so he's got his window still; and there's a very appropriate inscription on his tombstone:

"Awake, O north wind, and come, thou south: Blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow forth."

It was on Christmas Day, 1914, that I received one of the strangest documents I had ever read. It was in the form of a letter from Jonathan Martin, who had made himself a torch of ambition and fear to many moths in London by painting portraits that were certain to be the pictures of the year, but also certain to reveal all the idiosyncrasies, good and bad, of their subjects. It was the fashion to call him cynical. In fact, he was an artist, and a great one.

His unusual power of eliciting unexpected meanings from apparently meaningless incidents and objects was not confined to his art. In private conversation, he would often startle you with a sentence that was like the striking of a match in a dark room. You didn't know that the room was dark until he spoke; and then, in a flash, mysterious relationships at which you had never guessed, were established. You caught a glimpse of an order and a meaning that you had not discerned before. The aimless thing over which you had barked your shin became a coal scuttle; the serried row of dark objects that irritated your left elbow became the works of Shakespeare; and, if you were lucky, you perhaps discovered the button by which you could switch on the electric light, and then sit down by the hearth and read of "beauty, making beautiful old rhyme."

But this is a very faint hint of the kind of illumination with which he would surprise you on all kinds of occasions. I shall never forget the way in which he brought into a queer juxtaposition "the Day" that Germany had been toasting for forty years and the final request for an answer before midnight, which was embodied in the British ultimatum. He would give you a patch of unexpected order in the chaos of politics, and another in the chaos of the creeds—patches that made you feel a maddening desire to widen them until they embraced the whole world. You felt sure that he himself had done this, that he lived in a re-integrated universe, and that—if only there were time enough—he could give you the whole scheme. In short, he saw the whole universe as a work of art; and he conceived it to be his business, in his own art, to take this or that apparently isolated subject and show you just the note it was meant to strike in the harmony of the whole. He was very fond of quoting the great lines of Dante, where he describes the function of the poet as that of one who goes through the world and where he sees the work of Love, records it. But, please to remember, this did not imply that the subject was necessarily a pleasant one. Beauty was always there, but the beauty was one of relationships, not of the thing itself. As he once said, "an old boot in the gutter will serve as a subject if you can make it significant, if you can set it in relation to the enduring things." It is necessary to make this tedious preface to his odd letter, or the point of it may be lost.

"I want to tell you about the most haunting and dramatic episode I have encountered during these years of war," he wrote. "It was a thing so slight that I hardly know how to put it into words. It couldn't be painted, because it includes two separate scenes, and also—in paint—it would be impossible to avoid the merely sentimental effect.

"It happened in London, during the very early days of the struggle. One afternoon, I was riding down Regent Street on the top of a bus. The pavements were crowded with the usual throng. Women in furs were peering into the windows of the shops. Newspaper boys were bawling the latest lies. Once, I thought I saw a great scribble of the Hand that writes history, where a theater poster, displaying a serpentine woman, a kind of Aubrey-Beardsley vampire, was half obliterated by a strong diagonal bar of red, bearing the words, 'Kitchener wants a hundred thousand men.' My mind was running on symbols that afternoon, and I wondered if it did perhaps mean the regeneration of art and life in England at last.

"Then we overtook a strange figure, a blind man, tapping the edge of the pavement with a rough stick, cut out of some country hedgerow. He was carrying, in his left hand, a four-foot pole, at the top of which there was nailed a board, banner-wise, about three feet long and two feet wide. On the back of the board, as we overtook him, I read the French text in big red letters: 'Venez a moi, vous tous qui etes travaillés et chargés, et je vous soulagerai.'

"On the other side of the board, as we halted by the curb a little in front of him, there was the English version of the same text, in big black letters: 'Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and i will give you rest.'

"The blind man was tall and lean-faced, and held himself very upright. He was poorly dressed, but very clean and neat. The tap of his stick was like the smart tap of a drum, and he marched more rapidly than any of those who were going in the same direction.

"There were several things about him that puzzled me. There was no advertisement of any sect, or any religious meeting, nothing but the two texts on his placard. He went past us like a soldier, and he carried it like the flag of his regiment. He did not look as if he were asking for alms. The pride on his face forbade the suggestion; and he never slackened his quick pace for a moment. He seemed entirely unrelated to the world around him.

"Possibly, I thought, he was one of those pathetic beings whose emotions had been so stirred by the international tragedy that, despite their physical helplessness, they were forced to find some outlet. Perhaps he was an old soldier, blinded in some earlier war. Perhaps he was merely a religious fanatic. In any case, in the great web of the world's events, he seemed to be a loose fantastic thread; and although he was carrying a more important message than any one else, nobody paid any attention to him.

"In a few moments, the bus had carried my thoughts and myself into other regions, and, for the time, I forgot him. I occupied myself, as I often do, in composing a bit of doggerel to the rhythm of the wheels. Here it is. It is pretty bad, but the occasion may make it interesting:

Once, as in London busses,At dusk I used to ride,The faces Hogarth paintedWould rock from side to side,All gross and sallow and greasy,And dull and leaden-eyed.They nodded there before meIn such fantastic shape,The donkey and the gosling,The sheep, the whiskered ape,With so much empty chatter,So many and foolish lies,I lost the stars of heavenThrough looking in their eyes.

Once, as in London busses,At dusk I used to ride,The faces Hogarth paintedWould rock from side to side,All gross and sallow and greasy,And dull and leaden-eyed.

They nodded there before meIn such fantastic shape,The donkey and the gosling,The sheep, the whiskered ape,With so much empty chatter,So many and foolish lies,I lost the stars of heavenThrough looking in their eyes.

"Late in the afternoon, I was returning westward, along the Strand. I remember walking slowly to look at the beauty of the sunset sky, against which the Nelson column, in those first days of the fight, rose with a more spiritual significance than ever before. The little Admiral stood like a watchman, looking out to sea, from the main mast of our Ship of State, against that dying glory. It was the symbol of the national soul, high and steadfast over the great dark lions, round which so many quarreling voices had risen, so many quarreling faces had surged and drifted away like foam in the past. This was the monument of the enduring spirit, a thing to still the heart and fill the eyes of all who speak our tongue to-day.

"I was so absorbed in it that I did not notice the thick crowd, choking the entrances to Charing Cross Station, until I was halted by it. But this was a very different crowd from those of peace-time. They were all very silent, and I did not understand what swarming instinct had drawn them together. Nor did they understand it themselves—yet. 'I think they are expecting something,' was the only reply I got to my inquiry.

"I made my way round to the front of the station, but the big iron gates were closed and guarded by police. Nobody was allowed to enter the station. Little groups of railway porters were clustered here and there, talking in low voices. I asked one of these men what was happening.

"'They're expecting something, some train. But we don't know what it is bringing.'

"As he spoke, there was a movement in the crowd. A compact body of about forty ambulance men marched through, into the open space before the station. Some of them were carrying stretchers. They looked grave and anxious. Some of their faces were tense and white, as if they too were expecting something, something they almost dreaded to see. This was very early in the war, remember, before we knew what to expect from these trains.

"The gates of the station swung open. The ambulance men marched in. A stream of motor ambulances followed. Then the gates were closed again.

"I waited, with the waiting crowd, for half an hour. It was impossible now to make one's way through the dense crush. From where I stood, jammed back against the iron railings, in front of the station, I could see that all the traffic in the Strand was blocked. The busses were halted, and the passengers were standing up on the top, like spectators in some enormous crowded theater. The police had more and more difficulty in keeping the open space before the station. At last, the gates were swung apart again, and the strangest procession that London had ever seen began to come out.

"First, there were the sitting-up cases—four soldiers to a taxicab, many of them still bandaged about the brows with the first blood-stained field dressings. Most of them sat like princes, and many of them were smiling; but all had a new look in their faces. Officers went by, gray-faced; and the measure of their seriousness seemed to be the measure of their intelligence, rather than that of their wounds. Without the utterance of a word, the London crowd began to feel that here was a new thing. The army of Britain was making its great fighting retreat, before some gigantic force that had brought this new look into the faces of the soldiers. It was our first real news from the front. From the silent faces of these men who had met the first onset with their bodies, we got our first authentic account of the new guns and the new shells, and the new hell that had been loosed over Europe.

"But the crowd had not yet fully realized it. A lad in khaki came capering out of the station, waving his hands to the throng and shouting something that sounded like a music-hall jest. The crowd rose to what it thought was the old familiar occasion.

"'Hello, Tommy! Good boy, Tommy! Shake hands, Tommy! Are we downhearted, Tommy?' The old vacuous roar began and, though all the faces near me seemed to have two eyes in them, every one began to look cheerful again.

"The capering soldier stopped and looked at them. Then he made a grotesque face, and thrust his tongue out. He looked more like a gargoyle than a man.

"The shouts of 'Tommy, Tommy,' still continued, though a few of the shouters were evidently puzzled. Then a brother soldier, with his left arm in the sling, took the arm of the comedian, and looked a little contemptuously at the crowd.

"'Shell-shock,' he said quietly. And the crowd shouted no more that day. It was not a pleasant mistake; and it was followed by a procession of closed ambulances, containing the worst cases.

"Then came something newer even than wounded men, a motley stream of civilians, the Belgian refugees. They came out of the station like a flock of sheep, and the fear of the wolf was still in their eyes. The London crowd was confronted by this other crowd, so like itself, a crowd of men in bowler hats and black coats, of women with children clinging to their skirts; and it was one of the most dramatic meetings in history. The refugees were carrying their household goods with them, as much as could be tied in a bundle or shut in a hand-bag. Some of the women were weeping. One of them—I heard afterwards—had started with four children but had been separated from the eldest in the confusion of their flight. It was doubtful whether they would ever be re-united.

"Now, as this new crowd streamed out of the gates of the station towards the vehicles that had been prepared for them, some of their faces lifted a little, and a light came into them that was more than the last radiance of the sunset. They looked as if they had seen a friend. It was a look of recognition; and though it was only a momentary gleam, it had a beauty so real and vivid that I turned my head to see what had caused it.

"And there, over the sea of faces that reached now to the foot of the Nelson column, I saw something that went through me like great music. Facing the gates of the station, and lifting out of the midst of the crowd like the banner of a mighty host, nay, like the banner of all humanity, there was a placard on a pole. The sunset-light caught it and made it blaze like a star. It bore, in blood-red letters, the solemn inscription that I had seen in the earlier part of the day: 'Venez a moi, vous tous qui etes travaillés et chargés, et je vous soulagerai.'

"My blind man had found his niche in the universe. It was hardly possible that he was even conscious of what he was doing; hardly possible that he knew which side of his banner was turned towards the refugees, whether it was the English, that would mean nothing to them, or the French that would speak to them like a benediction. He had been swung to his place and held in it by external forces, held there, as I myself was jammed against the iron railings. But he had become, in one moment, the spokesman of mankind; and if he had done nothing else in all his life, it had been worth living for that one unconscious moment.

"You may be interested to hear the conclusion of the doggerel which came into my head as I went home:

Now, as I ride through London,The long wet vistas shine,Beneath the wheeling searchlights,As they were washed with wine,And every darkened windowIs holy as a shrine.The deep-eyed men and womenAre fair beyond belief,Ennobled by compassion,And exquisite with grief.Along the streets of sorrowA river of beauty rolls.The faces in the darknessAre like immortal souls."

Now, as I ride through London,The long wet vistas shine,Beneath the wheeling searchlights,As they were washed with wine,And every darkened windowIs holy as a shrine.

The deep-eyed men and womenAre fair beyond belief,Ennobled by compassion,And exquisite with grief.Along the streets of sorrowA river of beauty rolls.The faces in the darknessAre like immortal souls."

Collected Poems—2 Vols.The Lord of MisruleA Belgian Christmas Eve(Rada)The Wine-PressWalking Shadows—ProseOpen BoatsTales of the Mermaid TavernSherwoodThe Enchanted Island and Other PoemsDrake: An English Epic

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