Chapter II

The roadmender, however, had become part of herself, and as her life went on so he in her went on. But we cease to watch the moving picture of a fictitious experience at the roadside where men and the sacrificial beasts—the procession of a common life—went by. We are embarked upon the swiftly flowing river of her own life, as it passes to the sea. Henceforth the author speaks of herself almost undisguised; she is still the roadmender, but he lives, moves towards his death, rejoices, suffers, contemplates, reflects, as she does, in the actual process of her being. What happens happens here and now—this is a day-book we are reading, very faithful, very candid, and only the more pathetic to us when we know it as it really is.

‘The next milestone’ marked for her the entrance to the valley of the shadow of death. She knew that still the days might but slowly drag out their tale, and she be long, yet, in passing through; she was assured now, and not only by her own conviction, that never would she pass from beneath that shadow until the gate of earth closed behind her, and she found herself in some such ‘brave new world’ as she had seen before in dream or vision, where the inner world of spirit, of the joy and light and hope in which her spirit dwelt while she was here, would show itself more plainly, less confused.

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

There, in an old house fronting the Thames, she watched from her bed no longer the green grass, the meadows and the white gate with the roadmender’s road, but the highway of water, ‘the silent river of my heart’ she calls it, ‘with its tale of wonder and years.’

Her love of roads and of running water is significant for the understanding of her character and mind. She is of those for whom life is movement, and time is real.

Nothing for her stands still, is fixed—static, as we say now; the whole creation moves with the movement and communicated freedom of the purposes of God, and with the outpouring of the divine spirit in the spirits of men. Even in the flux of earth she sees the flowing of the great rivers of the heavenly love; and all earth’s roads and streams are but ways of that eternal journey of man, of which his temporal journeys are at once the cloak and sacrament.

As she looks upon the landscape of the world it grows transparent for her, and paradise, with its lucent life and many-coloured waters, shines through. The life of the spirit is more real to her than any life beside, more real, more powerful, constraining. When she writes of little things you see that for her there are no little things; each touches the eternal and has its endless depth of meaning there. And because there is this endless meaning, this unfathomed background, this movement of all within the movement that is carrying all, roads have magic in her eyes—or rather are symbols of a more than magical truth. She watches the multitude travelling there along the ages in the pilgrimage of life that every man must share. No event, no spectacle in earth or heaven stands alone; she has the mystic’s sense of wholeness and continuity, as of the dark impenetrable wonders underlying everything that can be seen even by the mystic’s eye. Therefore, that which is seen signifies, carries with it, all the rest; every road ‘leads to the end of the world,’ every river has ‘its tale of wonder and years’ and flows into the sea where its waters shall be transformed.

She tells us that to meet death in the town was not what she had desired. ‘I, a shy lover of the fields and woods, longed always, should a painless passing be vouchsafed me, to make my bed on the fragrant pine needles in the aloneness of a great forest; to lie once again as I had lain many a time, bathed in the bitter sweetness of the sun-blessed pines, lapped in the manifold silence; my ear attuned to the wind of Heaven with its call from the Cities of Peace. In sterner mood, when Love’s hand held a scourge, I craved rather the stress of the moorland with its bleaker mind imperative of sacrifice. To rest again under the lee of Rippon Tor, swept by the strong peat-smelling breeze; to stare untired at the long cloud-shadowed reaches, and watch the mist-wraiths huddle and shrink round the stones of blood; until my sacrifice too was accomplished, and my soul had fled. A wild waste moor; a vast void sky; and naught between heaven and earth but man, his sin-glazed eyes seeking afar the distant light of his own heart.’

But these moods had passed, and although the scourge Love held now in his hand was heavy and the sacrifice long of its accomplishment, she was, as she says, content to lie patiently in the great capital, with its stir of life and death, of toil and strife and pleasure, which she had thought ‘an ill place for a sick man to wait in’; and there find ‘the fulfilment by antithesis of all desire.’ ‘“It is not good that the man should be alone,” said the Lord God.’

Day and night she follows the great barges on the waterway, as she followed in her mind the coming and going on the road near her white gate. ‘Throughout the long watches of the night I follow them; and in the early morning they slide by, their eyes pale in the twilight; while the stars flicker and fade, and the gas lamps die down into a dull yellow blotch against the glory and glow of a new day.’ ‘It is like Life,’ she would have said again had you asked her; but she tells you nothing of her weariness in those night-watches nor of her pain.

On the wooden cross that marks her grave there are these words: ‘Lo, how I loved thee!’ They are taken from her last gift to me, Mother Julian’s ‘Revelations of Divine Love.’

In the groaning and travailing of creation she bore her part, but never alone; always God was there bearing his part and the part of every one. Across the whole world there lay for her the light of the glory of divine sacrifice. Not for her was any picture of a serene and far-away God without ‘parts or passions,’ looking on at the world’s pain; it was the glory of her God to share all pain. There was nothing, no weariness of hers or any man’s, no suffering, even of the beasts, that was not his. And faith in God gave her also faith in suffering, in the value of a sacrifice to be accomplished, of a travail that should bring forth fruit to all eternity, of groaning that was the utterance of slaves working towards their manumission and the freedom of divine sons. ‘Lo, how I loved thee!’ All men shall hear this when their own sacrifice is indeed accomplished, and their ‘sin-glazed eyes’ open to see who it is that has sacrificed himself in them. This was her strength.

Why, then, should she tell us of the suffering she bore, as she went through the valley of the shadow comforted in the strength of the divine Companion of her way, the Love that so loved her and all the world?

It is fitting that she writes here the story of Gawdine, the organ-grinder whom it was once her ‘privilege to know’; it is fitting that I repeat it now.

‘He was a hard swearer, a hard drinker, a hard liver, and he fortified himself body and soul against the world: he even drank alone, which is an evil sign.’

‘One day to Gawdine sober came a little dirty child, who clung to his empty trouser leg—he had lost a limb years before—with a persistent unintelligible request. He shook the little chap off with a blow and a curse; and the child was trotting dismally away, when it suddenly turned, ran back, and held up a dirty face for a kiss.

‘Two days later Gawdine fell under a passing dray which inflicted terrible internal injuries on him. They patched him up in hospital, and he went back to his organ-grinding, taking with him two friends—a pain which fell suddenly upon him to rack and rend with an anguish of crucifixion, and the memory of a child’s upturned face. Outwardly he was the same save that he changed the tunes of his organ, out of long-hoarded savings, for the jigs and reels which children hold dear, and stood patiently playing them in child-crowded alleys, where pennies are not as plentiful as elsewhere.

‘He continued to drink; it did not come within his new code to stop, since he could “carry his liquor well”; but he rarely, if ever, swore. He told me this tale through the throes of his anguish as he lay crouched on a mattress on the floor; and as the grip of the pain took him he tore and bit at his hands until they were maimed and bleeding, to keep the ready curses off his lips.

‘He told the story, but he gave no reason, offered no explanation: he has been dead now many a year, and thus would I write his epitaph:—

‘He saw the face of a little child, and looked on God.’

Love the supreme Sculptor at work on Gawdine, as on herself in her weariness and pain, at work too on the welter of all this world, calling forth from the rudest marble the divine Beauty that love is—this she sees. Love, too, looking from the face of a child and searching out his own image, his own response, from behind the battered mask that hides it from every other eye. And pain, the friend of sinners, the opportunity of love human and divine, love no less divine in that it has entered into man—this, too.

The whole philosophy to which Michael Fairless had attained is written in the true tale of Gawdine; a living, vibrant philosophy it was, entering into herself, her action, her judgements whether of reflective thought or of intuitive discovery.

It is not her way to see in an ill-driven dray the miraculous handiwork of God or a punishment for sin. “All things,” she would have told us, as she tells us here, “work together for good” in those who do not resist good when it comes. The dray and the face of the child are for her instruments and channels of God; yet neither is constrained, compelled—each is free according to its measure, each follows the law of its own being. So both are sacraments of the universal sacrament in which our lives are set and, according to their different measure, become mediators of the divine. The opportunity for both God and man is to be found everywhere by those who are willing to receive a gift; in pain or pleasure, riches or poverty, good hap or disaster. You have not to go in search of it; but neither must you turn away, or deny it even when it comes as the bitterest drop in the cup that you must drink. ‘Two friends—an anguish of crucifixion, and the memory of a child’s upturned face.’

One thing more this story brings out—a conviction which establishes for her, once for all, that without the law there is no sin. A new law is born in Gawdine telling him, through the wound he gives to a little child, that he must ‘keep the ready curses off his lips.’ But he could “carry his liquor well,” he was still guiltless of offence in that, still waiting for a new law concerning that. And his judges must wait too.

This is of her abiding sense of movement in every man’s life—a movement that gathers as it goes, and in which the man changes, not as a dead thing, a tool, or toy, is changed, but by a free and living creation, in which nothing is made actual and real that does not spring from the creative heart of his own character. You do not make a character as you build a house, laying one stone upon another; nor do you alter it as you might alter a house, pulling out these stones, and putting others in. It grows by inherent power, assimilating, rejecting, amplifying or transmuting, as though that which comes to it were food, which indeed it is—food from heaven or from hell. And every particle of this food that is truly incorporated in the man’s life goes to change character through and through, may be trusted to do it. Therefore, behind laws outworn and habits that should be outgrown, the charity that believes all things and hopes all things discovers the man as he really is, with promise of the man that he will be. Therefore, too, it is a charity that works for men in the light of knowledge of the men, and works wonders—as did Michael Fairless by its means. She says of the thirteenth century bishop about whom she writes a little later, that ‘he has known darkness and light and the minds of many men; most surely, too, he has known that God fulfils Himself in strange ways.’ We may say the same of her, for she never forgot the ‘strange ways’ of God with men.

Winter drew towards its end, and she still lived to enjoy once more winter’s promise of the spring and the memories alive in her of springs gone by. ‘On Sunday,’ she writes, ‘my little tree’ [the tree outside her window-panes] ‘was limned in white and the sparrows were craving shelter at my window from the blizzard. Now the mild thin air brings a breath of spring in its wake and the daffodils in the garden wait the kisses of the sun. Hand-in-hand with memory I slip away down the years, and remember a day when I awoke at earliest dawn, for across my sleep I had heard the lusty golden-throated trumpeters heralding the spring.’

Verily I believe she had heard those golden-throated trumpeters, for the blood of the plants ran in her veins, as did the blood of beasts and birds, and of all the common life. She was of the community of earth and nothing could ever set her apart. ‘The earth called,’ she says, ‘the fields called, the river called—that pied piper to whose music a man cannot stop his ears. It was with me as with the Canterbury pilgrims:—

‘“So priketh hem nature in hir corages;
Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages.”’

In memory she sped on, ‘light of heart and foot with the new wine of the year,’ until she heard ‘the voice of the stream,’ as with her body’s ears, and as with her body’s eyes saw spring’s pageant; ‘green pennons waving, dainty maids curtseying, and a host of joyous yellow trumpeters proclaiming “Victory” to an awakened earth.’

Then—so like her—she notes the solitary flower, one growing apart close to the old tree’s side. ‘I sat down by my lonely little sister, blue sky overhead, green grass at my feet, decked, like the pastures of the Blessèd, in glorious sheen; a sea of triumphant golden heads tossing blithely back as the wind swept down to play with them at his pleasure.’

‘It was all mine,’ she says, from one of her deepest convictions, ‘to have and to hold without severing a single slender stem or harbouring a thought of covetousness; mine, as the whole earth was mine, to appropriate to myself without the burden and bane of worldly possession.’

* * * * *

‘The river of God is full of water. The streets of the City are pure gold. Verily, here also having nothing we possess all things.’

Thus she comes back to her sick-room in the dreadful yet beautiful city of earth, possessing ‘all things.’

The gulls from the river sought the open sea; ‘the swoop and circle of silver wings in the sunlight’ was for her to be no more; and with her heart she followed them ‘to the free airs of their inheritance, to the shadow of sun-swept cliffs and the curling crest of the wind-beaten waves.’

The little lime-tree before her window spoke to her of the green country—was ‘gemmed with buds, shy, immature, but full of promise.’ With the glory of that promise her desire went forth, but upborne by another promise—that of the greater spring for which her spirit waited looked and longed from the valley of the shadow. Of that she writes in the last chapter of this part, as the coming of a new life and a new light.

‘The dawn breaks, but it does not surprise us, for we have watched from the valley and seen the pale twilight. Through the wondrous Sabbath of faithful souls, the long day of rosemary and rue, the light brightens in the East; and we pass on towards it with quiet feet and opening eyes, bearing with us all of the redeemed earth that we have made our own, until we are fulfilled in the sunrise of the great Easter Day, and the peoples come from north and south and east and west to the City which lieth foursquare—the Beatific Vision of God.’

Then her heart sings with one of the old hymns that she delighted in:—

_Vere Ierusalem est illa civitas
Cuius pax iugis et summa ucunditas;
Ubi non prœvenit rem desiderium,
Nec desiderio minus est prœmium._

Great indeed is the reward that could match with the desire of her soul, with its need and its capacity; yet having nothing she possessed all things even here, and I do not doubt that she does so still.