Chapter V

The blinds were all drawn in the red-roofed house that stands at the cross-roads. It was not empty, for the smoke arose from its chimneys in the clear morning air. In other days the music of song and laughter often floated from its open windows, but now it was stricken dumb. From it two sons had gone to take their place in the line of soul and fire that girdles these islands, warding them from destruction.

In a moment the veiled windows flashed their meaning. In the long lists of the dead I found the name I looked for. I had schooled myself to look at these lists, thinking of them in the mass as force or power; but that one name insisted on its individuality. They were all individual lives, each throbbing with intensest self-realisation, each with his love and hope and fear. There was none among them so poor but some heart clung to them. They may die, no longer in units, but in broad swathes, mown down by machine guns, but they are individual hearts still. In masses the sea swallows them up, trenches are filled with them, but however much we try we cannot narcotise our hearts by sophistries. Some day a name stands out alone--and we realise.

All over the land, in every parish, blinds are being drawn in houses where music and laughter are silenced. There comes the surge of a wild revolt. It is not these individual hearts alone that lie stricken, it is the joy of the centuries yet to be. In nameless graves lie the dream-children who will never now be born. This criminal sealing up of the very fountain of life--how can we bear it?

And yet we open not our mouths in protest. Is it because we are losing our sensitiveness--becoming brutalised? It might be that. For nothing coarsens the mind like that tide of hatred and passion which war sends sweeping through the hearts of men. And yet it is not that. For when they told the mother, breaking it gently as love alone can do, that her son was dead, she bowed her head in silence, yielding herself to the solace of tears; but in a little while she said brokenly: "It is good to die so: I would not have my son shelter himself behind other mothers' sons."

No, it is not because we are already coarsened that the heart can bear. It is rather because we have realised with the passing away of the old world of the last long summer days (it seems already centuries remote) that there are some things so great that they can transfigure even death. When the loyalty to the highest can only be fulfilled through death, we acquiesce in the sacrifice. In our parish we have not been coarsened--we have been quickened.

***

It seems as if it were in another era that my friend at the top of the Gallows' Road proved to me convincingly that death alone was king. With a keen irony he depicted this little globule of a world, a third-rate satellite of a fifth-rate star, floating in the abysses, in relation to the universe but as a mere grain of sand amid all the sand on the world's shores; and on that puny speck of a world he pictured the ephemeral generations, mere flashes of troubled consciousness--and then darkness.

It was reasonable when they thought this world the centre of all things, with the sun and moon and stars circling it round as humble ministrants, that they should believe in some high destiny for themselves. But now that they know how miserably and unspeakably insignificant the world is, it was but vanity and arrogance for any man to think of himself as of any value whatever in the scheme of things. His life was as the flashing of a midge's wings. His end was as a candle blown out in the night.

***

One evening, when the air was vibrant with the melody of birds and laden with the perfume of the roses that filled the garden, he developed another train of thought. He pictured the glut of life there would be if all the generations on this and millions unnumbered of worlds all survived. With vivid gestures he passed them all before the eye--low-browed savages, cannibals, fetish-worshippers, Calvinists, and at last the aesthetics of our day. "There would be no room for them--no use for them at all--it would be a glut which baffles all imagination." There was no way out but that the individual perished to prevent the universe from being crowded out.

And the cobbler at the top of the brae described to me how his dog was run over in the street. "He gaed a bark--and he never gaed anither. It'll be like that at the end with us a'. We'll gae out like my dawg." It was a queer result of the glimpse which came to us of an illimitable universe--this cheapening of ourselves. There was nothing at last but the charnel-house of the crowded kirkyard, where the generations lay layer upon layer, and where the opening of a grave reminded the old clerk, as he quaintly declared, of nothing but a dentist's shop. The teeth survived for unrecorded centuries--but that was all.

It is strange the tricks the memory plays. For, sitting here, glancing over the crowded sheet filled with the names of the dead, I remembered these things. And there came the sense of the madness of the universe and the intolerableness of life, if the end of all heroism was but that--nothingness and corruption. A handful of bones thrown up by the beadle to make room for the dead of to-day--is that all that is left of those who handed down the lamp of life to us? Is that all that will be left of us too at the last?

In the ordinary day my friend at the top of the Gallows' Road and the cobbler on the breast of the brae would have said that that was the end. But the extraordinary day has come upon us unawares, and in the extraordinary day this little, burdened, pain-racked life becomes suddenly unendurable unless it lie in the bosom of eternity. If there be no rainbow circling the heavens above the carnage heaps of the stricken battlefields, if the farewell of death be a farewell for ever, how can the heart endure?

***

It certainly looks to the seeing of the eye as if destruction were the end. With the perishing of the body everything seemeth to perish: all love, all thought, all tenderness vanish for ever. But the eyes and the ears are for ever playing us false; and here, too, they deceive us. For the world is so ordered that nothing ever perishes. In nature there is no destruction. A handful of ashes in a grate look like annihilation, but what it represents is really resurrection. The imprisoned sunrays of uncounted aeons, stored up in the lumps of coal, have been released from the prison-house, and gone forth again as heat and as light. The physical body may seem to perish; what really happens is that its constituent elements are re-grouped.

But in the realm of beauty, is there not destruction possible there? Through long centuries faith and devotion rear a great cathedral, every line and curve of which is instinct with beauty. Every statue breathes the love and hope and fears of men. In vaulted aisles and "windows richly dight," it symbolises the Unseen--the beauty which the heart yearns for. On that beauty materialised, ruthless Vandalism rains shot and shell; the devouring flames consume it. Its gaunt walls are now a monument of barbarism. Has nothing perished there? Is it not mockery to speak of the conservation of the constituent elements there? For loveliness has vanished there from off the face of the earth, and beauty which no hand of man can ever restore has been annihilated.

But it has not. For beauty is not in things, but in souls. The beauty lay in the soul of the architects that planned, in the hearts of the builders that carved the stones until they seemed to breathe--and shells cannot destroy that. The loveliness was shrined in the souls of the generations that gazed, and, gazing, were raised into the fellowship of the hearts that planned and builded. Thus did the spirit of beauty grow in the hearts of men--and shells cannot destroy that.

And let these charred walls be left to the alchemy of time, and nature will clothe them in richer loveliness. Lichen and moss will grow on them, and the moonlight will etherialise them. One symbol of beauty may seem to perish; but the spirit of beauty itself, dwelling in the hearts of men and abiding at the core of the universe, is indestructible. The thing which we deem perishable, no power on earth can kill.

***

There is on earth something infinitely more precious than the material substance, indestructible though it be. The most beautiful thing the world can show is a good man. Through the years forces play on him, and each force adds its element of beauty. He has struggled with adversity, and in the conflict he has learned patience, tolerance and a wide charity. Waves of affliction have passed over him, and he has learned tenderness and sympathy with human suffering, so that bruised hearts come and lie down in his shadow, and there find healing. With eyes cleansed from self, he looks out on the comedy and tragedy of life, and he sees the hidden springs. The healing power that goes forth from him grows with the years. At last he dies.

Does nature conserve the shell while it consigns the jewel in the shell--the man himself, with all his love and tender thought and unselfish care--to annihilation? That is unthinkable. To know one good man is to know that the human personality is imperishable. It was through that knowledge that the soul of man triumphed over the terror of death.

There walked in Galilee a Teacher who made a handful of peasants feel the possibilities of moral loveliness latent in the human heart, and when He died they could not associate the thought of death with Him. "It was not possible that He should be holden of it," they said one to another. Everything was possible but that He could become as a clod in the valley of corruption. Of course even that was possible if the world were a chaos given over for sport to malicious demons.

It would be possible, then, that the self-sacrificing love stronger than death, and the spirit of unsullied purity should become mere dust. But the possibility of the world being ruled by any except a Righteous Power did not occur to the untutored Galileans. Therefore they faced death with level eyes, refusing to believe in its triumph, saying to their hearts, "It is not possible."

And that is the rock on which to plant our feet in the day when the world is given over to the wild welter of bloodshed. In every parish over all the land blinds are pulled down, and hearts, wrapped round in the dimness, sit still in the shadow of a dumb affliction. They will never again hear the familiar footsteps coming to the door; they will hear it in their dreams--only to awake and find silence. Never again will the first question be when the door is opened, as it was through all the days since the golden days of childhood, "Where is mother?" But the great things which made life noble have not been destroyed by bullet or shell. No man is worthy of freedom except the man who is prepared to die for it. The heart, which in death proved itself deserving of freedom, has entered into the fulness of freedom. The heavens are again aglow when we realise that.

***

It was the Professor who made me sure of those things. I met him at the "Priory," where my old friend carries on his controversy with the Pope--or used to. In that house of his one meets all sorts of visionaries from the ends of the earth. A Waldensian pastor full of the dream of a rejuvenated Italy; a leader of French Protestants, who has forgotten his controversy with the Pope in the great upheaval through which his race are finding their soul once more; a dreamer from across the Atlantic, his eyes a-gleam with the vision of a reunited Christendom--these are the men you will find drinking tea at the Priory on any day in our parish.

The original bond between them was their controversy with Rome, but they have now forgotten all about that. There, in a happy hour, I met the Professor. One phrase of his lit up for me the days of darkness. "We see the alchemy of Providence at work all round about us," he exclaimed, pushing his fingers through his hair until it stood up all on end, an aureole of white.

"It is the flower of our manhood that is perishing," said the "Prior," while our hostess was nervously solicitous over the fate of a teacup which the Professor was balancing in his left hand, utterly regardless of its purpose.

"Perishing!" exclaimed the Professor; "they are not perishing--they are living. To talk of the wastage of life is mere cant." Our hostess rescued the teacup, and the Professor had now the free use of both his hands. The one hand clutched his hair and the other made sundry gestures clinching his arguments.

"Why should we rail at death?" said he; "for death has been the saviour of humanity. It was death that made men of us. It was in the school of death that man learned unselfishness, self-sacrifice, chivalry and honour. There is nothing so ugly as the man whose heart is filled by the world. It is death that has saved us all from that. Were man's location here for ever, the world would be his god. A world without death would be a world with no room for the Cross. Men climbed the heights of nobility as they defied death. The crackling flames were unable to silence the martyrs' song; the march of the hosts of devouring tyranny could not move the hearts that chose death rather than slavery; the generations sealed with their blood their testimony that truth and loyalty to truth are more precious than life, and so met death with a smile; it was through this wrestling with death that great and noble character was forged on the anvil of life. Death was the weapon which forged greatness of soul. Death cannot destroy what death has created. That could only happen in an insensate world. What is it--death--but just this--the slave of immortality?"

If I could only write it down as the Professor spoke, if I could only make you see his eyes glowing with little darts of flame as he saw the whole world transformed into a mighty workshop in which the "alchemy of Providence" is transmuting the soiled substance of our humanity into living souls (over whom death can have no dominion) fashioned for heavenly destinies--then you, too, would believe. Since that day my old friend has not spoken a word about the "waste of the flower of the race."

***

The house with the drawn blinds stands at the cross-roads, and I must come back to it. What is it that has happened to him who lies in a nameless grave in France? The opportunity for winning glory and earthly fame did not come his way; he just laid down his life along with hundreds of thousands more. He has taken his place among the undistinguished dead.

"O, undistinguished dead,
Whom the bent covers or the rock-strewn steep
Shows to the stars, for you I mourn--I weep,
O, undistinguished dead.

"None knows your name,
Blackened and blurred in the wild battle's brunt,
Hotly ye fell with all your wounds in front.
That was your fame."

Not a line in the records of time for him. But there are other records--those of eternity. He has lost nothing of the thrill of life. He is being borne on that tide of self-surrender and heroism which has flowed through the ages, and bears those who embark on it to the very feet of God. He would not himself have it otherwise. "It is better far to go out with honour than survive with shame," wrote a comrade from the trenches, now united with him in death. There is a place for sorrow in our land, but its place is by the hearth-stones of those whose sons choose to survive with shame. He has taken his place among those who, unseen, are leading on the embattled hosts of his race to victory. He has discovered the treasures in store for the brave and the true. When, amid the flutterings of flags and the shouting of the people rejoicing in their deliverance, the great army will return home at last--he, too, will come.

At Kobe, when the bugles were welcoming the victorious Japanese home in 1895, Lafcadio Hearn spoke to an old man of those who would never return. "Probably the Western people believe," answered the old man, "that the dead never return. There are no Japanese dead who do not return. There are none who do not know the way." It is a poor, emasculated religion that does not believe that. When at the last the bugles call in the quiet evening ... they will come back. They will come crowned with glory and honour and immortality--with that victory which overcometh the world. Let the blinds be rolled up, and the windows be all flung open to the light.

VI

The Cities of the Plain