Chapter V

If we are not Love and the food of Love, what are we? Our blossoming cut down, we follow the setting sun into darkness and the night of rain.

Lovers, our beloved, is this the love for which our mothers bore us? O mothers, why bring us forth to such grieving? Our souls leap up against our fate, and our hearts break from our bosoms.

Kiss us, young sisters, in the name of Love and Death; and of the Lord of Love, who is King of its fountains and gardens, and opens their gates to the Beloved in Paradise.

O fair and stricken and undone--the young maids answer--come to us, you who are parted from the lips that cherished you and the flesh of your flesh.

And you, young maidens--the mourning women reply to them--you, who have missed your dream and your fruition, come to us, dear hearts.

Poor wives.... Poor maids!

They weep, and kiss each other, and clasp each other smiling through their sorrow.

Then, singing, they part beneath the roof of night, while Ocean consumes the last embers of day, and darkens under the sky incarnadine.

ANDRÉ SUARÈS

FIGURE

FROM A SKETCH IN COLOURED CRAYON]

_MRS. HUMPHRY WARD_

WORDSWORTH’S VALLEY IN WAR-TIME

August 8ᵗʰ, 1915. It is now four days since, in this village of Grasmere, at my feet, we attended one of those anniversary meetings, marking the first completed year of this appalling war, which were being called on that night over the length and breadth of England. Our meeting was held in the village schoolroom; the farmers, tradesmen, innkeeper and summer visitors of Grasmere were present, and we passed the resolution which all England was passing at the same moment, pledging ourselves, separately and collectively, to help the war and continue the war, till the purposes of England were attained, by the liberation of Belgium and northern France, and the chastisement of Germany.

A year and four days, then, since the war began, and in a remote garden on the banks of the Forth, my husband and I passed, breathless, to each other, the sheets of the evening paper brought from Edinburgh by the last train, containing the greater part of Sir Edward Grey’s speech delivered in the House of Commons that afternoon--War for Belgium--for national honour--and, in the long run, for national existence! War!--after these long years of peace; war, with its dimly foreseen horrors, and its unfathomed possibilities:--England paused and shivered as the grim spectre stepped across her path.

And I stand to-night on this lovely mountain-side, looking out upon the harvest fields of another August, and soon another evening newspaper sent up from the village below will bring the latest list of our dead and our maimed, for which English mothers and wives have looked in terror, day after day, through this twelve months.

And yet, but for the brooding care in every English mind, how could one dream of war in this peaceful Grasmere?

Is it really true that somewhere in this summer world, beyond those furthest fells, and the Yorkshire moors behind them, beyond the silver sea dashing its waves upon our Eastern coasts, there is still going on the ruin, the agony, the fury, of this hideous struggle into which Germany plunged the world, a year ago? It is past eight o’clock; but the sun which is just dipping behind Silver How is still full on Loughrigg, the beautiful fell which closes in the southern end of the lake. Between me and these illumined slopes lies the lake--shadowed and still, broken by its one green island. I can just see the white cups of the water-lilies floating above the mirrored woods and rocks that plunge so deep into the infinity below.

The square tower of the church rises to my left. The ashes of Wordsworth lie just beyond it--of Wordsworth, and that sister with the “wild eyes,” who is scarcely less sure of immortality than himself, of Mary Wordsworth too, the “perfect woman, nobly planned,” at whose feet, in her white-haired old age, I myself as a small child of five can remember sitting, nearly sixty years ago. A little further, trees and buildings hide what was once the grassy margin of the lake, and the old coach road from Ambleside, with Wordsworth’s cottage upon it. Dove Cottage, where “mighty poets” gathered, and poetry that England will never let die was written, is now, as all the world knows, a national possession, and is full of memorials not only of Wordsworth, his sister and his wife, but of all the other famous men who haunted there--De Quincey, who lived there for more than twenty years, Southey and Coleridge; or of Wordsworth’s younger contemporaries and neighbours in the Lakes, such as Arnold of Rugby, and Arnold’s poet son Matthew. Generally the tiny house and garden are thronged by Americans in August, who crowd--in the Homeric phrase--about the charming place, like flies about the milk pails in summer.

But this year there are no Americans, there are few visitors, indeed, of any kind as yet, though the coaches are beginning to bring them--scantily. But Grasmere does not distress itself as it would in other years, Wordsworth’s village is thinking too much about the war. Before the war--so I learn from a gentle lady, who is one of the most eager guardians of Grasmere traditions, and has made remarkable and successful efforts, through the annual “Grasmere play,” which is her creation, to maintain the rich old dialect of the dales--there were _two_ Grasmere men in the Navy, _two_ soldiers in the Regular army, and _three_ Reservists--out of a total male population of all ages of three hundred and eighty-nine. No one ever saw a soldier, and wages, as all over the north, were high. There was some perplexity of mind among the dale-folk when war broke out. France and Belgium seemed a long way off--more than “t’oother side o’ Kendal,” a common measure of distance in the mind of the old folks, whose schooling lies far behind them; and fighting seemed a strange thing to these men of peace. “What!--there’ll be nea fightin’!” said an old man in the village, the day before war was declared. “There’s nea blacks amongst ’em [meaning the Germans]--they’se civilised beings!” But the fighting came, and Grasmere did as Grasmere did in 1803, when Pitt called for volunteers for Home Defence. “At Grasmere,” wrote Wordsworth, “we have turned out almost to a man.” Last year, within a few months of the outbreak of war, seventy young men from the village offered themselves to the army; over fifty are serving. Their women left behind have been steadily knitting and sewing since they left. Every man from Grasmere got a Christmas present of two pairs of socks. Two sisters, washerwomen, and hard worked, made a pair each, in four consecutive weeks, getting up at four in the morning to knit. Day after day, women from the village have gone up to the fells to gather the absorbent sphagnum moss, which they dry and clean, and send to a manufacturing chemist to be prepared for hospital use. Half a ton of feather-weight moss has been collected and cleaned by women and school-children. One old woman who could not give money gathered the tufts of wool which the sheep leave behind them on the brambles and fern, washed them, and made them into the little pillows which prop wounded limbs in hospital. The cottages and farms send eggs every week to the wounded in France. The school-children alone bring fifty a week. One woman, whose main resource was her fowls, offered twelve eggs a week; which meant starving herself. And all the time, two pence, three pence, six pence a week was being collected by the people themselves, from the poorest homes, towards the support of the Belgian colony in the neighbouring village of Ambleside.

One sits and ponders these things, as the golden light recedes from Loughrigg, and that high crag above Wordsworth’s cottage. Little Grasmere has indeed done all she could, and in this lovely valley, the heart of Wordsworth’s people, the descendants of those dalesmen and daleswomen whom he brought into literature, is one--passionately one--with the heart of the Allies. Lately the war has bitten harder into the life of the village. Of its fifty young sons, many are now in the thick of the Dardanelles struggle; three are prisoners of war, two are said to have gone down in the Royal Edward, one officer has fallen, others are wounded. Grasmere has learnt much geography and history this last year; and it has shared to the full in the general deepening and uplifting of the English soul, which the war has brought about. France, that France which Wordsworth loved in his first generous youth, is in all our hearts,--France, and the sufferings of France; Belgium, too, the trampled and outraged victim of a Germany eternally dishonoured. And where shall we find nobler words in which to clothe the feeling of England towards a France which has lost Rheims, or a Belgium which has endured Louvain, than those written a hundred years ago in that cottage across the lake?

Air, earth and skies--
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind!

To Germany, then, the initial weight of big battalions, the initial successes of a murderous science: to the nations leagued against her, the unconquerable power of those moral faiths which fire our clay, and in the end mould the history of men!

... Along the mountain-side, the evening wind rises. The swell and beat of it among the rocks and fern, as the crags catch it, echo it, and throw it back reverberate, are as the sound of marching feet....

I hear it in the tread--irresistible, inexorable--of an avenging Humanity. The living and the dead are there, and in their hands they bear both Doom and Comforting.

MARY A. WARD

_Of this book, in addition to the regular edition, there have been printed and numbered one hundred and seventy-five copies de luxe, of larger format._

_Numbers 1-50 on French hand-made paper, containing four facsimiles
of manuscripts and a second set of illustrations in portfolio._

_Numbers 51-175 on Van Gelder paper._

End of Project Gutenberg's The Book of the Homeless, by Edith Wharton