Chapter II: A Mendicant Pilgrimage in the East (3)

Working a farm of fields that stand on edge, without men to help, and without much machinery, makes women into warriors or kills them. The grandmother and mother were no longer women. Even when they caressed the boy their faces were furrowed with invincible will-power. But Lady Iron-Heels still a woman, was confused in the alternative of manhood or death. She was indeed a flower not yet torn to pieces by the wind, greatly shaken, and therefore blooming the faster.

There was a red ribbon streaming over the gray rag-carpet. Lady Iron-Heels stooped, gave the ribbon a jerk, and a banjo came snarling from under the bed.

She sat on the warring colors of the crazy-quilt, and played a dance-tune, storming the floor with one heel. She grew pensive. She sang:--

“We shall rest in the fair and happy land
Just across on the ever-green shore,
Sing the song of Moses and the Lamb (by and by)
And dwell with Jesus evermore.”

Her neck had a yellow handkerchief round it. A brown lock swept across her leaping throat. Her cheeks and chin were bold as her iron heels. Underneath the precious silken sunburn, the blood was beating, beating, and trying to thicken into manhood to fight off death.

After the music the ladies dipped snuff in the circle around the dim fire.

IV

“THAT’S ALL THE CHURCH I GET”

I made a great palaver to Iron-Heels about giving me the banjo ribbon. She consented easily. Coquetry was not her specialty.

“What might be your name?” she asked.

There was no dodging now. The old woman spoke up as though to save me pain: “His name is Nicholas. But he is no kin to Lawyer Nicholas of Flagpond.”

After a long silence the girl said: “We came from Flagpond, once upon a time.”

She had been looking out the door at the clear bowl of the spring, and the reflection of the tall bushes, leaping in the wind.

I thought to myself: “She herself was John Kenton’s chief rose.” I thought: “He had her in mind when he set these ameliorating bushes through the wild.” Possibly the girl could not read or write. Yet she was royal.

Democracy has the ways of a jackdaw. Democracy hides jewels in the ash-heap. Democracy is infinitely whimsical. Every once in a while a changeling appears, not like any of the people around, a changeling whose real ancestors are aristocratic souls forgotten for centuries. As the girl’s eyes narrowed, she became Queen Thi, the masterful and beautiful potentate of immemorial Egypt whose face I have seen in a museum, carved on a Canopic jar. She was Queen Thi only an instant, then she became a Tennessee girl again, with the eyes of a weary doe.

She said: “Them roses give me comfort. That’s all the church I get.”

I asked: “Why are there so many roses between here and Greenville and none near Flagpond?”

It was her turn not to speak. The old woman as though to save her pain, answered: “The flowers of these parts were all brought in by John Kenton. He lived in Flagpond, but could not sell them there.”

And the mother of the little boy, the man-woman, whose husband had killed Kenton, broke her long silence: “The only flowers we have to-day are these he brought. I think we would die without them.... How do we get through the winter?”

Lady Iron-Heels and her sister-in-law took a swig of whisky from the jug under the table, and lifted up their hoes from the floor. The boy whimpered for a drink. They said: “Wait till you are a man.” All three climbed the hill.

Lady Iron-Heels was the last to go over the ridge. She saw me gather buds from both those bushes by the spring. She made a gesture of salute with her hoe.

I never travelled that way again. I passed by quickly; therefore I had a glimpse of what she was intended to be. “He that loseth his life shall find it.” I see her many a time when I am looking on scattered rose-leaves. She was a woman, God’s chief rose for man. She was scorned and downtrodden, but radiant still. I am only saying that she wore the face of Beauty when Beauty rises above circumstance.

The buds that I had gathered did not fall to pieces till I had passed by Daniel Boone’s old trail on through Cumberland Gap, on over big hill Kentucky into the Blue Grass. On the way I wrote this, their poor memorial, the Canticle of the Rose:--

It is an article of my creed that the petals of this flower of which we speak are a medicine, that they can almost heal a mortal wound.

The rose is so young of face and line, she appears so casually and humbly, we forget she is an ancient physician.

Yet so much tradition is wrapped around her stalk, it is strange she is not a mummy. Her ashes can be found in the tombs of the Pharaohs, in everlasting companionship with the ashes of the lotus and the papyrus plant. Her dust travels on every desert wind.

No love-song can do without her.

No soldier and no priest can scorn her. There were the Wars of the Roses. And there was a Rose in Sharon. Our wandering brother Dante found a great rose in Paradise.

There are white roses, sweet ghosts under the pine. There are yellow roses, little suns in the shadow. But the normal bloom is red, flushed with foolish ardors, laughing, shaking off the gossamer years. She remembers Love, but not too well, if love is pain. There is no yesterday that can daunt her and keep her dear heart-laughter down. In springtime her magic petals bring God to the weary and give Heaven’s strength to the wavering of heart.

She can turn the slave to a woman, the woman to something a little more than mortal. Oh, how bravely, with the same life-giving red, with the last of her virgin strength, she blooms and blooms on almost every highway. We find her on the road to Benares, on the road to Mecca, on the road to Rome, and on the road to Nowhere, in Tennessee.

Her red petals can almost heal a mortal wound.

II

A MENDICANT PILGRIMAGE IN THE EAST

IN LOST JERUSALEM

BEHOLD the Pharisees, proud, rich, and damned,
Boasting themselves in lost Jerusalem,
Gathered a weeping woman to condemn,
Then watching curiously, without a sound
The God of Mercy, writing on the ground.
How looked his sunburned face beneath the sun
Flushed with his Father’s mighty angel-wine?
God make us all divine.

A TEMPLE MADE WITH HANDS

I

THE DWELLING-PLACE OF FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY