Chapter I

I AM no longer a roadmender; 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.

But now the veil was held aside and one went by crowned with the majesty of years, wearing the ermine of an unstained rule, the purple of her people’s loyalty. Nations stood with bated breath to see her pass in the starlit mist of her children’s tears; a monarch - greatest of her time; an empress - conquered men called mother; a woman - Englishmen cried queen; still the crowned captive of her people’s heart - the prisoner of love.

The night-goers passed under my window in silence, neither song nor shout broke the welcome dark; next morning the workmen who went by were strangely quiet.

’VICTORIA DEI GRATIA BRITANNIARUM REGINA.’

Did they think of how that legend would disappear, and of all it meant, as they paid their pennies at the coffee-stall? The feet rarely know the true value and work of the head; but all Englishmen have been and will be quick to acknowledge and revere Victoria by the grace of God a wise woman, a great and loving mother.

Years ago, I, standing at a level crossing, saw her pass. The train slowed down and she caught sight of the gatekeeper’s little girl who had climbed the barrier. Such a smile as she gave her! And then I caught a quick startled gesture as she slipped from my vision; I thought afterwards it was that she feared the child might fall. Mother first, then Queen; even so rest came to her - not in one of the royal palaces, but in her own home, surrounded by the immediate circle of her nearest and dearest, while the world kept watch and ward.

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 cloudshadowed 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.

With years came counsels more profound, and the knowledge that man was no mere dweller in the woods to follow the footsteps of the piping god, but an integral part of an organised whole, in which Pan too has his fulfilment. The wise Venetians knew; and read pantheism into Christianity when they set these words round Ezekiel’s living creatures in the altar vault of St Mark’s:-

QUAEQUE SUB OBSCURIS DE CRISTO DICTA FIGURIS HIS APERIRE DATUR ET IN HIS, DEUS IPSE NOTATUR.

"Thou shalt have none other gods but me." If man had been able to keep this one commandment perfectly the other nine would never have been written; instead he has comprehensively disregarded it, and perhaps never more than now in the twentieth century. Ah, well! this world, in spite of all its sinning, is still the Garden of Eden where the Lord walked with man, not in the cool of evening, but in the heat and stress of the immediate working day. There is no angel now with flaming sword to keep the way of the Tree of Life, but tapers alight morning by morning in the Hostel of God to point us to it; and we, who are as gods knowing good and evil, partake of that fruit "whereof whoso eateth shall never die"; the greatest gift or the most awful penalty - Eternal Life.

I then, with my craving for tree and sky, held that a great capital with its stir of life and death, of toil and strife and pleasure, was an ill place for a sick man to wait in; a place to shrink from as a child shrinks from the rude blow of one out of authority. Yet here, far from moor and forest, hillside and hedgerow, in the family sitting-room of the English-speaking peoples, the London much misunderstood, I find the fulfilment by antithesis of all desire. For the loneliness of the moorland, there is the warmth and companionship of London’s swift beating heart. For silence there is sound - the sound and stir of service - for the most part far in excess of its earthly equivalent. Against the fragrant incense of the pines I set the honest sweat of the man whose lifetime is the measure of his working day. "He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?" wrote Blessed John, who himself loved so much that he beheld the Lamb as it had been slain from the beginning when Adam fell, and the City of God with light most precious. The burden of corporate sin, the sword of corporate sorrow, the joy of corporate righteousness; thus we become citizens in the Kingdom of God, and companions of all his creatures. "It is not good that the man should be alone," said the Lord God.

I live now as it were in two worlds, the world of sight, and the world of sound; and they scarcely ever touch each other. I hear the grind of heavy traffic, the struggle of horses on the frostbreathed ground, the decorous jolt of omnibuses, the jangle of cab bells, the sharp warning of bicycles at the corner, the swift rattle of costers’ carts as they go south at night with their shouting, goading crew. All these things I hear, and more; but I see no road, only the silent river of my heart with its tale of wonder and years, and the white beat of seagulls’ wings in strong inquiring flight.

Sometimes there is naught to see on the waterway but a solitary black hull, a very Stygian ferry-boat, manned by a solitary figure, and moving slowly up under the impulse of the far-reaching sweeps. Then the great barges pass with their coffined treasure, drawn by a small self-righteous steam-tug. Later, lightened of their load, and waiting on wind and tide, I see them swooping by like birds set free; tawny sails that mind me of red-roofed Whitby with its northern fleet; black sails as of some heedless Theseus; white sails that sweep out of the morning mist "like restless gossameres." They make the bridge, which is just within my vision, and then away past Westminster and Blackfriars where St Paul’s great dome lifts the cross high over a self-seeking city; past Southwark where England’s poet illuminates in the scroll of divine wisdom the sign of the Tabard; past the Tower with its haunting ghosts of history; past Greenwich, fairy city, caught in the meshes of riverside mist; and then the salt and speer of the sea, the companying with great ships, the fresh burden.

At night I see them again, silent, mysterious; searching the darkness with unwinking yellow stare, led by a great green light. They creep up under the bridge which spans the river with its watching eyes, and vanish, crying back a warning note as they make the upper reach, or strident hail, as a chain of kindred phantoms passes, ploughing a contrary tide.

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.