Chapter VI: Part II: I (2)

But of all things designed to minister life to the world, the Cross is the greatest and most awful. Its possibilities of regeneration are simply infinite; and in its case the danger is therefore all the greater. 'We preach Christ crucified,' wrote Paul, 'unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness, but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.' It is the most urgent and insistent note of the New Testament that a man may convert into the instrument of his condemnation and destruction that awful sacrifice which was designed for his redemption. It is the sin of sins; the sin unpardonable; the sin so impressively forbidden by that ancient and thrice reiterated commandment whose significance Sir Walter Scott pointed out to me in the cave by the side of the sea.

V

AN OLD MAID'S DIARY

_Christmas Eve, 1973._ Christmas-time once more! The season strangely stirs the memory, and the ghosts of Christmases long gone by haunt my solitary soul to-night. Somehow, a feeling creeps over me that this Christmas will be my last. Am I sorry? Yes, one cannot help feeling sorry, for life is very sweet. On the whole, I have been happy, and have, I think, done good. But oh, the loneliness! And every year has made it more unbearable. The friends of my girlhood have married, or gone away, or died, and each Christmas has made this desperate loneliness more hard to endure. Did God mean women to come into the world, to feel as I have felt, to long as I have longed, and then, after all, to die as I must die? None of the things for which women seem to be made have come to me. And now I have no husband to shelter me; no daughters to close my eyes; no tall sons to bear this poor body to its burial. I have pretended to satisfy myself by mothering other people's children; but it was cruel comfort, and often only made my heart to ache the more. And now it is nearly over; I have come to my very last Christmas. I have always loved to sit by the fire for a few minutes before lighting the lamp; and to-night as I do so something reminds me of the old days long gone by.

This little room, neat and cosy, but so quiet and so lonely, somehow brings back to my mind a dream that I had as a girl. Was it one dream, or was it several? Dear me, how the memory begins to piece it all together when once it gets a start! I wonder if I can trace it in my journal? I have always kept a journal--just for company. It runs into several big volumes now, and the handwriting has strangely altered with the years. I shall tear them all up and burn them to-morrow; it will be one way of spending my last Christmas! I have said things to this old journal of mine that a woman could not say to any soul alive. It has done me good just to tell these old books all about it. But my dream or dreams; when did they come? It must be sixty years ago, although, despite my loneliness, it really does not seem so long. But it can be no less, for it was in the days of the Great War. The war broke out in 1914--I was eighteen then!--but my dream came months afterwards when things were at their worst. It must have been in 1915. I remember that I had been watching the men in khaki. Everybody seemed to be going to the front. My brothers went; the tradesmen who called for orders; the men who served us in the shops; everybody was enlisting. All our menfolk had become soldiers. And, thinking about all this, I dreamed. I wonder if I entered it in my journal? And, if so, I wonder if I can find it? Yes; here it is. Ah, I thought so. It was a series of dreams; night after night for a week, Sunday alone excepted. I don't know why no dream came on Sunday. I will copy these six entries here, so that I can destroy the old volumes with their secrets without making an end of this. The dreams began on Monday.

* * * * *

_Tuesday, October 5, 1915._ I had such a strange dream last night. I thought I was at the front. Whether I was a nurse or not I have no idea; but you never know such things in dreams. Anyhow, I was there. I saw Fred and Charlie in the trenches as plainly as I have ever seen anything, and Tom the butcher-boy, and the young fellow who used to bring the groceries. And with them, and evidently on the best of terms with them, I saw a tall fellow with fair hair--such a gentlemanly fellow!--and after I had seen him I seemed to have no eyes for the others. If I looked to Fred, he only pointed to the boy with the fair hair. If I turned to Charlie, he nodded to the lad with the fair hair. Tom and the grocer's assistant did the same. And then the fellow with the fair hair looked up, and I saw his face--such a handsome face! He smiled--such a lovely smile!--and I felt myself blush. My confusion awoke me; and I knew it was a dream.

_Wednesday, October 6, 1915._ Would you believe it, you credulous old journal, I dreamed of my white-haired boy again last night! Isn't it silly? He was home from the war, wounded, but well again. And we were being married; only think of it! I can see it all now as plainly as I can see the white page before me as I write. The commotion at home; the drive to the church; the church itself; the ceremony; how plain it all was! Fred was best man; my white-haired boy evidently had no brothers. Jessie, my own sweet little sister, was my bridesmaid, although she looked a good deal older. It seemed funny to see her with her hair up, and with long skirts. The church seemed full of soldiers. Everybody who had known him, served with him, camped with him, or fought with him, simply worshipped him. At weddings I have always looked at the bride, and taken very little notice of the bridegroom. But at our wedding everybody was looking at my white-haired boy--so tall, so handsome, so fine--like a knight out of one of the tales of chivalry. And I was glad that they were all looking at him. And I was so happy, oh, so very, very happy! I was happy to think that everybody was so proud of my white-haired boy. And I was still more happy to think that my white-haired boy was mine, my very, very own. I was so happy that I cried, cried as though my heart would break for joy and pride and thankfulness. And my crying must have awakened me, for when I sat up and stared round my old bedroom in surprise there were tears in my eyes still. I wonder if I shall ever dream of my bridegroom again?

_Thursday, October 7, 1915._ I did; I really did! I dreamed of him again! I saw the home in which we lived, a beautiful, beautiful home. I do not mean that it was big, but that it was sweet and comfortable, and everything so nice! I thought that he was walking with me on the lawn. He was older, a good bit older; I should think twice as old as when I first saw him in the trenches. But he was still the same, still tall, still fair, and oh, such a perfect gentleman! What care he took of me! How proud and devoted he seemed! And how he gloried in the children! For I thought we had children, five of them! The eldest and the youngest were boys, Arthur, so like his father as I saw him first, and the youngest, Harry, such a romp! The three girls, too, were the light of his eyes and the brightness of his life. What times we all had together! I saw him once scampering across the fields with the children, whilst I sat among the cowslips knitting and awaiting the return of my merry madcaps. I saw him sitting with the rest of us around the fire in winter, whilst he told tales of the things that he did at the war. How the boys listened, almost worshipping! And again I saw him on the Sunday at the church. He sat next the aisle. I was so happy in being beside him, with the children on my right. What more, I wondered, could any woman want to fill her cup up to the brim? And, wondering, I awoke.

_Friday, October 8, 1915._ My dreams are getting to be like parts of a serial story. How real my white-haired boy seems to be! He has come into my life, and I cannot believe that he is only a dream-thing. I went for a walk yesterday with mother and Jessie, and they said I was silent and absent-minded. The truth was that I was thinking about him, yet how could I tell them? Nobody knows but my journal and myself. And last night--it seems scarcely possible--I saw him again! It was not quite so nice, for I thought we were very old. He was no longer tall and erect, but slightly bent, though stately still. And I leaned heavily upon his arm. And the children came, and brought their children--such a lot of them there seemed to be. He grew as young as ever in playing with these troops of happy little people. And for them there was no fun like a game with grandpapa. And as I sat and watched them, I liked to think that all these boys and girls would have something of him about them, and would grow up to cherish his dear memory as their ideal of all that a Christian gentleman should be. And sometimes I thought of their children, and their children's children, till I saw, floating before my fancy, hundreds and thousands of children yet to be; and I speculated idly as to how far his fine influence would carry down these coming generations. And once more I awoke.

_Saturday, October 9, 1915._ Oh, my journal, my journal! I dreamed of my white-haired boy again! How I wish I never had! If only I had always been able to think of him as I saw him on Wednesday night and Thursday! I was once more at the war. You know what funny things dreams are. In the trenches I again saw Fred and Charlie and Tom the butcher-boy, and the young fellow who used to bring the groceries. But this time they were all in action; when I saw them before they were resting. The air was heavy with battle-smoke; the great guns roared and reverberated; shells screamed and burst about me. It was like night, although I knew that it was daytime. As I stood and watched--looking for somebody--four Red Cross men passed me. They were bearing a stretcher, and on the stretcher was a mangled form. His face was hidden by his arm, half lying across his eyes. A strange impulse seized me. I sprang forward, raised his arm in the semi-darkness; there was a sudden flash caused by I know not what, and in the light of that fearful and revealing flash I recognized my white-haired boy! I trudged beside the stretcher to the hospital, knowing neither what I did nor what I said. And when we reached the hospital, my white-haired boy was dead! My white-haired boy, my white-haired boy, my white-haired boy was dead! Oh that I had never dreamed again!

_Sunday, October 10, 1915._ I dreamed once more, but not of my white-haired boy. I dreamed of myself; pity me that I had nothing better to dream of! I am only a girl; but in my dream I saw myself an old woman, old and lonely! Oh, so very, very lonely! I was sitting, I thought, in the dusk beside a bright and cheery fire in a neat and cosy little room. Neat and cosy, but oh, so lonely; and I felt sorry for myself, very sorry. For the self that I saw in my dream was a sad old self, a disappointed old self, a self that had fought bravely against being soured, but a self that had, after all, only partly succeeded. It was not a nice dream; the nice dreams that I had earlier in the week will never come again. No, it was not a nice dream, and I awoke feeling uneasy and unhappy; and my head was aching.

* * * * *

_Christmas Eve, 1973._ And so, with a shaky, withered hand, I have copied into the last pages of my journal the entries that I made in the first of these old volumes. What did they mean, those dreams that came to me so long ago? Was there a white-haired boy at the war, a white-haired boy who, if there had been no war, or if just one cruel shell had failed to explode, would have been the glory of my life and the father of my children? But there _was_ a war, and the fatal shell _did_ burst, and my white-haired boy and I never met, _never met_. The five happy children--those two fine boys and the three lovely girls--will never now gladden these dim old eyes of mine. Those troops of grandchildren, and those hosts of unborn generations that I saw in my happy fancy, will never leave the land of dreams and alight on this old world. In the days of the war, I remember how people wept with the widows, and sorrowed with the mothers whose brave sons were stricken down. And, God knows, none of that sympathy was wasted. Oh, it was heart-breaking to see the lusty women who would never see their husbands again; and the broken mothers who would never even have the poor consolation of visiting the graves of their fallen sons. And I was only a girl, a girl of nineteen. And nobody wept with me. I did not even weep for myself. Nobody knew about my white-haired boy. I did not know. But I know now. Yes, _I know now_. And God knows; I pillow my poor tired old head on that, God knows, _God knows_! And so this, then, is to be my last Christmas! Ah, well, so be it! And perhaps--who can tell?--perhaps, in a world where we women shall know neither wars, nor weddings, nor widowhood, I shall before next Christmas have found the face of my girlish dreams!

VI

THE RIVER

It is my great good fortune to dwell on the green and picturesque banks of a broad and noble river. 'Rivers,' says an old Spanish proverb which Izaak Walton quotes with a fine smack of approval, 'rivers were made for wise men to contemplate and for fools to pass by without consideration.' Let us beware lest we fall beneath the Spaniard's lash. For myself, I can at least affirm that I never saunter beside these blue, fast-flowing waters without feeling that the lines have fallen unto me in pleasant places. It is wonderful how, after awhile, the winding river seems to weave itself into the very texture and fabric of one's life. You stroll by it, bathe in it, row on it, fish in it, until every rock and every bank, every crag and every cliff, every twist and every bay, every deep and every shallow, takes its place among the intimacies and fond familiarities of life. It is one of the wonders of the world that this little island in the southern seas should pour into the Pacific so many fine majestic streams. And here, beside the lordliest of them all, I have made my home. It is good to stand on these green banks, to survey the great expanse of gleaming waters, and to see the stately ships glide in and out. I often think of that early morning when John Forster found Carlyle standing beside the Thames at Chelsea, lost in an evident reverie of admiration. 'I should as soon have thought of assaulting him as of addressing him,' says Forster. To be sure! We do lots of things in this life of which we have no reason to be ashamed, things that are indeed altogether to our credit, yet in the performance of which we do not care to be discovered. It would be a sad old world, for example, if love-making went out of fashion; but no man cares to be caught in the act, for all that. Carlyle was caught making love to the Thames, as I have often made love to the Derwent, and he keenly resented the intrusion. 'He abruptly turned away,' adds the offender, 'and moved across the roadway toward Cheyne Row, with that curious slow shuffle habitual with him, and I saw him no more.'

Why, my very Bible seems a new book as I ponder its pages by the banks of the Derwent. What a different story the Old Testament would have had to tell if Jerusalem had stood by the side of a river like this! The Jews never forgave the frowning Providence that denied to their fair city a river. They heard how Babylon stood proudly surveying the shining waters of the Euphrates, how Nineveh was beautified by the lordly Tigris, how Thebes glittered in stately grandeur on the Nile, and how Rome sat in state beside the Tiber; and they were consumed with envy because no broad river protected them from their foes, and bore to their gates the wealthy merchandise of many lands. I never noticed until I dwelt by these blue waters how all the Psalms and prophecies are coloured by this phase of Judean life. The prophets were for ever dreaming of the river; the psalmists were for ever singing of the river. Nothing delighted the people like a vision, such as visited Ezekiel, of a broad river rushing out from Jerusalem. No greater or more glowing message ever reached the disconsolate and riverless people than when Isaiah proclaimed, 'The glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams, wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby!' Jehovah, that is to say, shall impart to Jerusalem all the advantages of a river without any of its attendant dangers. Many a faithless river, by bearing the destroyer on its bosom to the city gates, had proved the undoing of the people after all. But no such fate shall overwhelm Jerusalem. And, hearing this, the riverless city was comforted.

It is recorded of the Right. Hon. John Burns that, in the days when he was President of the Local Government Board, he found himself strolling on the Terrace of the House of Commons, surveying, with all the transports of a born Londoner, the shining waters of the Thames. His reverie was, however, rudely interrupted by a supercilious American who was inclined to regard with scornful contempt the object of Mr. Burns' ecstatic admiration. 'After all,' the American demanded, 'what is it but a ditch compared with the Missouri or the Mississippi?' This was more than even a Cabinet Minister could be expected to stand. 'The Missouri and the Mississippi!' Mr. Burns exclaimed in a fine burst of patriotic indignation. 'The Missouri and the Mississippi are water, sir, and nothing but water; but that,' pointing to the Thames, '_that_, sir, is liquid history, _liquid history_!' Yes, Mr. Burns is quite right. The Thames has a glory of its own among the world's historic streams, although it is only a matter of degree. All rivers are liquid history. The records of the world's great rivers constitute themselves, to all intents and purposes, the history of the race. To take a single illustration, it is obvious that the student who has mastered the history and hydrography of the Niger, the Congo, the Zambesi, the Orange, and the Nile has little more to learn about Africa. From the times of which Herodotus writes, when Cyrus lost his temper with the Tigris, and turned it out of its channel for drowning one of his sacred white horses, rivers have loomed very largely in the annals of human history. Indeed, Professor Shailer Mathews, in _The Making of To-morrow_, says that there never was, until recent times, a nation that did not paddle or sail its way into history. Civilization, he says, got its first start on water. 'In the early days rivers were thoroughfares, and they continued to be thoroughfares until the middle of last century. Even the United States was born on water. It was easier to get to New Orleans from Montreal by way of the Mississippi than overland.' One has only to conjure up the wealthy historical traditions that cluster about the names of the Euphrates and the Nile, the Indus and the Volga, the Rhine and the Danube, the Tiber and the Thames, in order to convince himself that the records of the world's great waterways are inextricably interwoven with the annals of the human race.

We cannot, however, disguise from ourselves the fact that the affection that we feel for our rivers is not based solely, or even primarily, on utilitarian considerations. Nobody supposes that it is the navigable qualities of the Ganges that have led the Hindus to believe that to die on its banks, or to drink before death of its waters, is to secure to themselves everlasting felicity. Yet, when we attempt to account in so many words for the fascination of the river, the task becomes intricate and difficult. Macaulay spent his thirty-eighth birthday on the banks of the Rhone, and transferred his impressions to his journal. 'I was delighted,' he says, 'by my first sight of the blue, rushing, healthful-looking river. I thought, as I wandered along the quay, of the singular love and veneration which rivers excite in those who live on their banks; of the feeling of the Hindus about the Ganges, of the Hebrews about the Jordan, of the Egyptians about the Nile, of the Romans about the Tiber, and of the Germans about the Rhine. Is it that rivers have, in a greater degree than almost any other inanimate object, the appearance of animation, and something resembling character? They are sometimes slow and dark-looking; sometimes fierce and impetuous; sometimes bright, dancing, and almost flippant.' However that may be, the fact itself remains; and it is surprising that our literature does not more adequately reflect this marked peculiarity. Macaulay himself felt the lack, and dreamed of writing a great epic poem on the Thames. 'I wonder,' he said, 'that no poet has thought of writing such a poem. Surely there is no finer subject of the sort than the whole course of the river from Oxford downwards.' But a century has gone by and the poem has not been penned. Shakespeare dwelt beside the Avon; Goethe loved to stroll among the willows on the banks of the Lahn; Coleridge was born, and spent the most impressionable years of his life in the beautiful valley of the Otter. And one of the tenderest idylls of our literary history is the picture of Wordsworth wandering hand in hand with Dorothy among the most delightful river scenery of which even England can boast. Yet, beyond a few sonnets and snippets, nothing came of it all. Neither the laughing little streams nor the more majestic and historic waterways have ever yet found their laureates.

But there are compensations. If the bards have been strangely and unaccountably irresponsive to the music of the waters, our great prose writers have caught its murmur and its meaning. Two particularly, John Bunyan and Rudyard Kipling, have given us the classics of the river. Bunyan's river--the river that all the pilgrims had to cross--is too familiar to need more than the merest mention. And as for Mr. Kipling, he, like Bunyan, is a writer of both poetry and prose. As a poet he has failed to do justice to the river, as all the poets have failed. He has given us a snippet, as all the poets have done. He makes the Thames tells its own tale, and a wonderful tale it is.

I remember the bat-winged lizard birds,
The Age of Ice and the mammoth herds;
And the giant tigers that stalked them down
Through Regent's Park into Camden Town;
And I remember like yesterday
The earliest Cockney who came my way,
When he pushed through the forest that lined the Strand,
With paint on his face and a club in his hand.

But I forgave Kipling for not having repaired the omission of the older poets when I read _Kim_. _Kim_ is the greatest story of a river that has ever been written. Who can forget the old lama and his long, long search for the River? Buddha, he thought, once took a bow and fired an arrow from its string, and, where that arrow fell, there sprang up a river 'whose nature, by our Lord's beneficence, is that whoso bathes in it washes away all taint and speckle of sin.' And so, through Mr. Kipling's four hundred vivid pages, there wanders the old lama, through city and rice-fields, over hills and across plains, asking, always asking, one everlasting question: 'The River; the River of the Arrow; the River that can cleanse from Sin; where is the River? Where, oh, where is the River?' All India, all the world seems to enter into that ceaseless cry. It is the deepest, oldest, latest cry of the universal heart: 'The River; the River of the Arrow; the River that can cleanse from Sin; where is the River? Where, oh, where is the River?' And it is the Church's unspeakable privilege to take the old lama's hand and to point his sparkling eyes to the cleansing fountains.

VII

FACES IN THE FIRE

It was half-past ten! I had no idea it was so late! Our little camp was pitched about four miles up Captain's Gully, under the massive shelter of Bulman's Ridge. It had been a perfect, cloudless day; all our excursions--fishing, shooting, botanizing, and the rest--had been crowned with delightful success; and after supper we sat round the great camp fire, talking. We talked, of course, of the only things ever discussed around camp fires--old times and old faces. I was struck with the number of sentences that began '_I remember once----_.' Then, one by one, the others stole away to their tents--those little white tents that had looked like stray snowflakes in a wilderness of bush whenever we caught sight of them from the hills in the daytime, yet which seemed all the world to us at night. One by one, with a 'Here's off!' or a 'So long!' the others had slipped quietly away, and the fire and I were at last left to ourselves. How still it all was! Now and then I heard the queer cry of a mopoke up the gully; and once there was the swish of a bough beneath the leap of a 'possum. But, save for these, I could hear no sound but the subdued hissing and rumbling of the logs as they crumpled up in the fire before me. I remained for awhile, looking into the glowing embers; and there, in the dying fire, the faces of my companions all came back to me. And not theirs alone; for I saw, too, the old familiar faces of which we had been chatting, and a hundred others as well. It was then that I was startled by the 'possum in the branches overhead. I looked at my watch; it was half-past ten; and I too turned my back on the fire that had revealed so much. And I wondered, as I moved away to my tent, why, by the side of the fire, we always think of the Past, dream of the Past, talk of the Past. Why do our yesterdays all spring to new and glorious life when the flickering flames are lighting up our faces?

Our camp broke up a day or two later; and all such thoughts seemed to have died with the fire that gave them birth. But, oddly enough, they returned to me this morning. For, when I arose, I was conscious of a distinct snap of winter in the atmosphere; and when I entered the study I discovered that the divinity who presides over such matters had lit the first fire of another year. I saluted it with pleasure, not merely for the sake of the comfort it promised me, but for its own sake. I greeted it as one greets an old and trusted friend. On this side of the world we scarcely know what winter means, and we are therefore in danger of underestimating the historic value of the fire. We can produce nothing in Australia worthy of comparison with those stern winters with which Northern and Western writers have made us so familiar. We are accustomed to a literature which pours in upon us from high Northern latitudes, and which describes, with a picturesque realism that evokes a sympathetic shiver, the glacial snowdrifts that, for weeks on end, lie deep along the hedgerows; the hapless bird that falls, frozen to death, from the leafless bough; the rabbit that perishes of slow starvation in its wretched burrow; and the fish that floats in stupor beneath the very ice that furnishes the skater's paradise. But whilst, to us, snow and ice are things of imagination or of memory, I felt thankful this morning, as I knelt down like some old fire-worshipper and warmed my numb hands at the cheerful blaze, that this Tasmanian winter of ours has just enough sting in it to preserve in me a lively appreciation of this ancient and honourable institution.

For the fireside is sanctified by a great and glorious tradition. It enshrines all that is most mystical and most wonderful in our civilization. In his pictures of the forest, Jack London again and again emphasizes the magic effect of the fireside even on the creatures of the wild. When White Fang, the wolf, saw the tongues of flame and clouds of smoke that arose from beneath the Indian's hands, he was mystified. It seemed to him a sign of some divinity in man of which he knew nothing. It drew him as by some mesmeric influence. 'He crawled several steps towards the flame. His nose touched it.' And when he felt the pain it seemed as if an angry deity had smitten him.

In _The Call of the Wild_, Jack London returns to the same idea. Buck, the great dog, was a creature of the wild, and sometimes the yearning for the wild swept over him with almost irresistible authority. What was it that kept him from bounding off into the forest and shaking the dust of civilization from his paws for ever? It was because 'faithfulness and devotion, things born of fire and roof,' had been developed within him. He had sprawled on the hearth before John Thornton's fire; had looked up hungrily into John Thornton's face; had learned to love his master more than life itself; and to the fireside of his master he was bound by invisible chains that he could not snap. 'Deep in the forest,' says Jack London, 'a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest. But as often as he gained the soft unbroken earth and the green shade, the love for John Thornton drew him back to the fire again.' The fire; it is always the fire. The fire seems, even to the brutes, to be the emblem of the genius of our humanity.

For the triumph of humanity is the creation of home; and the soul of the home is the fireside. The luxurious summer evenings, with their wide range of out-of-door allurements, tend to discount the attractions of the home, and to depreciate the value of domestic intercourse. We return from business and rush out again for recreation. But winter furnishes a salutary corrective. When the day's work is done, and the home is once reached, everything conspires to enhance its seductive charms. Outside, the dark and the cold, the bleak wind and the driving rain, threaten multiple discomforts to the gadabout who dares to venture forth; whilst within, the blazing fire, the cheerful hum of table talk, and the genial hospitalities of home make their most resistless appeal amidst the wintriest conditions. Was it not for this reason that the fire came to be regarded for centuries as the natural emblem of domestic felicity? In the days before matches were invented, when the lighting of a fire was a much more laborious business than it is to-day, the first fire in the home of a newly married pair was started by the bearing of a burning brand from each of the homes from which bride and bridegroom came. It was intended as a kind of ritual. The communication of the flame from the old hearths which they had left to the new one which they had established was designed to symbolize the perpetuation of all that was worthiest and most sacred in the homes from which the young people had come. It was the transfer of the Past--that radiant and tender Past that saluted me from the glowing embers of my camp fire in the gully--to the roseate and unborn future.

But although it was in my solitude that the fire in Captain's Gully spoke to me, the fire is no lover of loneliness. It is the very emblem of hospitality, and there are few graces more attractive. We boast that an Englishman's home is his castle, and we do all that legislation can accomplish to make that castle impregnable and inviolate. We close the door, and draw the blinds, and we feel that we have effectually shut the whole world out. And yet when a friend looks in, we suddenly discover that our happiness consists, not in barring and bolting the heavy front door, but in flinging it wide open. We seat him in the best chair; we bring out the best dainties from the cupboard, the best books from the shelves, and the best stories from the treasure-house of memory. The fire crackles, cheeks glow, and eyes sparkle as the genial conversation grows in interest and surprise. Nor is the pleasure by any means the monopoly of the host; the guest shares it to the full. What is more exhilarating or satisfying than an evening spent round a good fire with a few kindred spirits in whose company one is perfectly at home? You can speak or be silent, just as the mood takes you. You have not to labour to be entertaining if you feel that you have nothing to say; nor need you struggle to restrain yourself if you feel in the humour to talk. You have not to weigh every word as you instinctively do in the presence of less familiar or less trusted companions. You eat the fruit that is handed round, or decline it, just as the whim of the moment dictates, feeling under no obligation either way. You are entirely at your ease. Sometimes the one conversation holds the entire group, and the semi-circle listens, interested or amused, to the tale that one member of the cluster is telling. At other times the party automatically divides itself into knots; the gentlemen, it may be, breaking into politics or business, and the ladies comparing notes on more enticing themes. The fire blazes; the buzz of conversation rises and falls, sinks and swells. Occasionally the attention is so concentrated on the subdued voice of one speaker that scarcely a sound is audible outside the door; a moment later the argument is so exciting, or the laughing so boisterous, that everybody seems to be shouting at the same time. The gramophone, and all such adventitious aids to the tolerable passage of a leaden evening, are never so much as thought of. Even the piano is left out in the cold. Every moment is crowded with the flush of unalloyed delight. And when the last guest has vanished, and the house seems silent and empty, it suddenly occurs to you that the great chief guest whom you have been entertaining, or who has been entertaining you, was the Past, the radiant and glorified Past. The phrase that we heard so often in Captain's Gully, the '_I remember once----_,' has been the key-note of the evening's gossip.

For the fact is that the fireside, whether in Captain's Gully in summer-time or at home in dead of winter, is a sort of magic observatory, a kind of camera-obscura. Outside, the world is wrapped in impenetrable darkness. But the kindly glow of the fire stimulates the memory, spurs the imagination, and brings back all our lost loves and all our veiled landscapes in a beautified and idealized form. The lonely man sees faces in the fire; but there are other things as well. The springs and summers that haunt our fancy as we talk of them beside a roaring fire are the blithest and gayest seasons that the world has ever known. Never was sky so blue, or earth so fair, or sun so bright, or air so sweet as the sky and the earth, the sun and the air, that we contemplate from our coign of vantage by the side of the fire. The fragrance of the hawthorn in the hedgerow; the humming of the bees along the bank; the carolling of birds in the tree-tops; the bleating of the lambs across the meadows,--these never appear so alluring as when we view them from the wonderful observatory at the fireside. Dean Hole tells with what sadness he used to pluck the last roses of summer. And then, he says, 'the chill evenings come, curtains are drawn, and bright fires glow. Then who is so happy as the rose-grower with the new catalogues before him?' He sits by his fire and talks lovingly of the roses that he grew in the summer that has vanished, and his eyes light up with enthusiasm as he thinks of the still fairer blossoms of the summer that will soon be here. And so two summer-times sit by his hearth at mid-winter, and he revels in the company of each of them.

It is ever so. The crackling of the logs wakes up the slumbering Past, and it all comes back to us. As soon as a man gets his feet on the fender he instinctively thinks of old times and old companions. The flames have destroyed much; but they also revive much. They bring back to us our yesterdays; they bring back, indeed, the lordly yesterdays of the remotest, stateliest antiquity. Surely that was the idea in Macaulay's mind when he wrote 'Horatius':

And in the nights of winter,
When the cold north winds blow,
And the long howling of the wolves
Is heard amidst the snow;
When round the lonely cottage
Roars loud the tempest's din,
And the good logs of Algidus
Roar louder yet within;

When the oldest cask is opened,
And the largest lamp is lit;
When the chestnuts glow in the embers,
And the kid turns on the spit;
When young and old in circle
Around the firebrands close;
When the girls are weaving baskets,
And the lads are shaping bows;

When the goodman mends his armour,
And trims his helmet's plume;
When the goodwife's shuttle merrily
Goes flashing through the loom,--
With weeping and with laughter
Still is the story told,
How well Horatius kept the bridge
In the brave days of old.

Now, when I come to think of it, is it any wonder that the days of auld lang syne, and the old familiar faces, should all come back in the flames? For the scientists tell me that this study-fire of mine is simply the radiance of far-back ages suddenly released for my present comfort. Long before a single black-fellow prowled about these vast Australian solitudes, the sun bathed this huge continent in apparently superfluous brightness. But the sun knew what it was doing. The coalbeds gathered up and stored that sunshine through centuries of centuries. The black men came; and the white men came; and here at last am I! I need that sunshine of ages long gone by. The miner digs for it; brings it to the surface; sends it to my study; and, lo, I am this very morning warming my numb fingers at its genial glow!

And so the match with which I light a fire, either in the camp away up in the bush, or in this quiet study at home, is nothing less than the wand of a magician! At the barred and bolted doors of the irrecoverable Past I tap with that small wand and cry, 'Open, Sesame!' And, lo, a miracle is straightway wrought! The doors that have been closed for years, perhaps for ages, swing suddenly open, and the sunshine comes streaming out! That match liberates the imprisoned brightness. The scientists say so, and I can easily believe it. For this is the essential glory of the fireside. All the sunniest memories rush to mind as we cluster round the hearth. All the sunniest experiences of the dead and buried years spring to vigorous life once more. All the sunniest faces--the dear, familiar faces of the long ago--smile at us again from out the glowing embers. And perhaps--who shall say?--perhaps some thought like this haunted the minds of a prophet of the Old Testament and an apostle of the New when, greatly daring, they declared that 'our God is a consuming fire!' Did they mean that, when we see Him as He is, all the holiest and sweetest and most precious treasure of the Past will be more our own? Did they mean that in Him the sunshine of all the ages will again salute us?

VIII

THE MENACE OF THE SUNLIT HILL

I am writing on the six hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Dante. The poet was born in 1265; I am writing in 1915. Six hundred and fifty years represent a tremendous slice of history; and these six hundred and fifty years span a chasm between two specially notable crises in the annals of this little world. Dante was born in a year of battle and of tumult, of fierce dissension and of bitter strife. It was a year that decided the destinies of empires and changed the face of Europe. Such a year, too, is this in which I write, and, writing, look down the long, long avenue of the centuries that intervene. This morning, however, I am not concerned with the story of revolution and of conflict, of political convulsions and of nations at war. Such a study would have fascinations of its own; but I deliberately leave it that I may contemplate the secret history of a great, a noble, and a tender soul. Edward FitzGerald tells us that he and Tennyson were one day looking in a shop window in Regent Street. They saw a long row of busts, among which were those of Goethe and Dante. The poet and his friend studied them closely and in silence. At last FitzGerald spoke. 'What is it,' he asked, 'which is present in Dante's face and absent from Goethe's?' The poet answered, '_The divine_!' Now how did that divine element come into Dante's life? He has himself told us. Has the spiritual autobiography of Dante, as revealed to us in the introductory lines of his _Inferno_, ever taken that place among our devotional classics to which it is justly entitled? Surely the pathos, the insight, and the exquisite simplicity of that first page are worthy of comparison with the choicest treasures of Bunyan or of Wesley, of Brainerd or of Fox. Let us glance at it.

I

I have heard many evangelists preach on such texts as: 'The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost.' It was necessary, of course, that they should explain to their audiences what they meant by this lost condition. Wisely enough, they have usually had recourse to illustration. The child lost in a London crowd; the ship lost on a trackless sea; the sheep lost among the lonely hills; the traveller lost in the endless bush,--all these have been exploited again and again. From literature, one of the best illustrations is the moving story of Enoch Arden. When poor Enoch returns from his long sojourn on the desolate island, he finds that his wife, giving him up for dead, has married Philip, and that his children worship their new father. It is the garrulous old woman at the inn who tells him, never dreaming that she is speaking to Enoch. Says she:

'Enoch, poor man, was cast away and lost!'
He, shaking his grey head pathetically,
Repeated, muttering, 'Cast away and lost!'
Again in deeper inward whispers, 'Lost!'

But none of these illustrations are as good as Dante's. He opens by describing the emotions with which, at the age of thirty-five, his soul awoke. He was lost!

In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray,
Gone from the path direct: and e'en to tell
It were no easy task, how savage wild
That forest, how robust and rough its growth,
Which to remember only, my dismay
Renews, in bitterness not far from death.

Neither Bunyan's pilgrim in his City of Destruction, nor his City of Mansoul beleaguered by fierce foes, is quite so human or quite so convincing as this weird scene in the forest. The gloom, the loneliness, the silence, and the absence of all hints as to a way out of his misery; these make up a scene that combines all the elements of adventure with all the elements of reality. Dante was lost, and knew it.

II

The poet cannot tell us by what processes he became entangled in this jungle. 'How first I entered it I scarce can say.' But it does not very much matter. The way by which he escaped is the thing that concerns us; and to this theme he bravely addresses himself. In his description of his earliest sensations in the dark forest, several things are significant. He clearly regarded it as a very great gain, for example, to have discovered that he was lost. 'I found me,' he says, 'I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.' Those three words, '_I found me_,' remind us of nothing so much as the record of the prodigal, 'And he came to himself.' I am pleased to notice that it is of the incomparable story of the prodigal that Dante's opening confession reminds most of his expositors. Thus, Mr. A. G. Ferress Howell, in his valuable little monograph on Dante, observes that this finding of himself 'shows that he has got to the point reached by the prodigal son when he said, "I will arise and go to my father." He found, that is to say, that he had altogether missed the true object of life. The wild and trackless wood,' Mr. Howell goes on to observe, 'represents the world as it was in 1300. Why was it wild and trackless? Because the guides appointed to lead men to _temporal felicity_ in accordance with the teachings of Philosophy, and to eternal felicity in accordance with the teachings of Revelation--the Emperor and the Pope--were both of them false to their trust.' So here was poor Dante, only knowing that he was hopelessly lost; and unable to discover among the undergrowth about him any suggestion of a way to safety.

III

Suddenly the Vision Beautiful breaks upon him. He stumbles blindly through the forest until he arrives at the base of a sunlit mountain:

... a mountain's foot I reached, where closed
The valley that had pierced my heart with dread.
I looked aloft, and saw his shoulders broad
Already vested with that planet's beam
Who leads all wanderers safe through every way.

The hill is, of course, the life he fain would live--steep and difficult, but free from the mists of the valley and the entanglements of the wood. And is it not illumined by the Sun of Righteousness--'Who leads all wanderers safe through every way'? He stepped out from the valley and cheerfully commenced the ascent. And then his troubles began. One after the other, wild beasts barred his way and dared him to persist. His path was beset with the most terrible difficulties. Now here, if anywhere, the poet betrays that spiritual insight, that flash of genuine mysticism, that entitles him to rank with the great masters. For whilst he wandered in the murky wood no ravenous beasts assailed him. There, life, however unsatisfying, was at least free from conflict. But as soon as he essayed to climb the sunlit hill his way was challenged. It is a very ancient problem. The psalmist marvelled that, whilst the wicked around him enjoyed a most profound and unruffled tranquillity, his life was so full of perplexity and trouble. John Bunyan was arrested by the same inscrutable mystery. Why should he, in his pilgrim progress, be so storm-beaten and persecuted, whilst the people who abandoned themselves to folly enjoyed unbroken ease? I have often thought of the problem when out shooting. The dog invariably ignores the dead birds and devotes all his energy to the fluttering things that are struggling to escape. In the stress of the experience itself, however, such comfortable thoughts do not occur to us, and it seems passing strange that, whilst our days in the wood were undisturbed by hungry eyes or gleaming fangs, our attempt to climb the sunlit hill should bring about us a host of unexpected enemies. Many a young and eager convert, fancying that the Christian life meant nothing but rapture, has been startled by the discovery of the beasts of prey awaiting him.

IV

And such beasts! Trouble seemed to succeed trouble; difficulty followed on the heels of difficulty; peril came hard upon peril.

Scarce the ascent
Began, when, lo! a panther, nimble, light,
And covered with a speckled skin, appeared,
Nor when it saw me, vanished, rather strove
To check my onward going; that ofttimes
With purpose to retrace my steps I turned.

He had scarcely recovered from the shock, and driven this peril from his path, when

... a new dread succeeded, for in view
A lion came, 'gainst me, as it appeared,
With his head held aloft and hunger-mad.
That e'en the air was fear-struck. A she-wolf
Was at his heels, who in her leanness seemed
Full of all wants, and many a land hath made
Disconsolate ere now. She with such fear
O'erwhelmed me, at the sight of her appalled,
That of the height all hope I lost.

The panther, the lion, and the wolf; that is very suggestive, and we must look into this striking symbolism a little more closely.

V

The three fierce creatures that challenged Dante's ascent of the sunlit hill represent evils of various kinds and characters. If a man cannot be deterred by one form of temptation, another will speedily present itself. It is, as the old prophet said, 'as if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him.' If one form of evil is unsuccessful, another instantly replaces it. If the panther is driven off, the lion appears; and if the lion is vanquished, the lean wolf takes its place. But there is more than this hidden in the poet's parable. Did Dante intend to set forth no subtle secret by placing the three beasts in that order? Most of his expositors agree that he meant the panther to represent _Lust_, the lion to represent _Pride_, and the wolf to represent _Avarice_. Lust is the besetting temptation of youth, and therefore the panther comes first. Pride is the sin to which we succumb most easily in the full vigour of life. We have won our spurs, made a way for ourselves in the world, and the glamour of our triumph is too much for us. And Avarice comes, not exactly in age, but just after the zenith has been passed. The beasts were not equidistant. The lion came some time after the panther had vanished; but the wolf crept at the lion's heels. What a world of meaning is crowded into that masterly piece of imagery! Assuming that this interpretation be sound, two other suggestions immediately confront us; and we must lend an ear to each of them in turn.

VI

The three creatures differed in character. The panther was _beautiful_; the lion was _terrible_; the wolf was _horrible_. Although the poet knew full well the cruelty and deadliness of the crouching panther's spring, he was compelled to admire the creature's exquisite beauty. 'The hour,' he says,