Part 9

And, while he stood in silence by her grave, Hearing the ropes creak as they lowered her down Into the cold dark hollow, while he breathed The smell of the moist earth, those calm strange words— _I am the Resurrection and the Life_, Echoed and echoed through his lonely mind, Only to deepen his agony of farewell Into Eternity. Dumbly there he strove To understand how accents so divine, In words so worthy of eternal power, So postulant of it in their calm majesty, Could breathe through mortal lips. Madman or God, Who else could say them? God it could not be, If in his mortal blindness he saw clear; And yet, and yet, could madness wring the heart Thus, thus, and thus, for nineteen hundred years? _Would that she knew, would God that she knew now,_ _How much we loved her!_ The blind world, still ruled By shams, and following in hypnotic flocks The sheep-bell of an hour, still thought of him “The Man of Science” as less or more than man, Coldly aloof from love and grief and pain; Held that he knew far more, and felt far less Than other men, and, even while it praised The babblers for their reticence and their strength, The shallow for their depth, the blind for sight, The rattling weathercocks for their love of truth, Ere long would brand, as an irreverent fool, This great dumb simple man, with his bowed head.

Could the throng see that drama, as I saw it— I, Shadow-of-a-Leaf,—could the blind throng discern The true gigantic drama of those hours Among the quiet hills as, one by one, His facts fell into place; their broken edges Joined, like the fragments of a vast mosaic, And, slowly, the new picture of the world, Emerging in majestic pageantry Out of the primal dark, before him grew; Grew by its own inevitable law; Grew, and earth’s ancient fantasies dwindled down; The stately fabric of the old creation Crumbled away; while man, proud demigod, Stripped of all arrogance now, priest, beggar, king, Captive and conqueror, all must own alike Their ancient lineage. Kin to the dumb beasts By the red life that flowed through all their veins From hearts of the same shape, beating all as one In man and brute; kin, by those kindred forms Of flesh and bone, with eyes and ears and mouths That saw and heard and hungered like his own, His mother Earth reclaimed him. Back and back, He traced them, till the last faint clue died out In lifeless earth and sea. I watched him striving To follow further, bending his great brows Over the intense lens.... Far off, I heard The murmur of human life, laughter and weeping; Heard the choked sobbings by a million graves, And saw a million faces, wrung with grief, Lifted forlornly to the Inscrutable Power.

I saw him raise his head. I heard his thought As others hear a whisper—_Surely this_ _Implies design!_ And worlds on aching worlds Of dying hope were wrapped in those four words. He stared before him, wellnigh overwhelmed For one brief moment, with instinctive awe Of Something that ... determined every force Directed every atom.... Then, in a flash, The indwelling vision vanished at the voice Of his own blindfold reason. For what mind Could so unravel the complicated threads, The causes that are caused by the effects Of other causes, intricately involved, Woven and interwoven, in endless mazes, Wandering through infinite time, infinite space, And yet, an ordered and mysterious whole, Before whose very being all mortal power Must abdicate its sovereignty? A dog Might sooner hope to leap beyond the mind Of Newton than a man might hope to grasp Even in this little whirl of earth and sun The Scheme of the All-determining Absolute. And yet—if that—the All-moving, were the One Reality, and sustained and made all forms, Then, by the self-same power in man himself Whatever was real in man might understand That same Reality, being one substance with it, One substance with the essential Soul of all,— Might understand, as children understand, Even in ignorance, those who love them best; Might recognise, as through their innocent eyes, The highest, which is Love, though all the worlds Of lesser knowledge passed unheeded by. What meant those moments else? Moments that came And went on wings, wild as these wings of mine, The wings of Shadow-of-a-Leaf, Quick with a light that never could be reached By toiling up the mountain-sides of thought; Consummate meanings that were never found By adding units; moments of strange awe When that majestic sequence of events We call the cosmos, from its wheeling atoms Up to its wheeling suns, all spoke one Power, One Presence, One Unknowable, and One Known?

_In the beginning God made heaven and earth_: He, too, believed it, once....

II

THE VOYAGE

As if the wings Of Shadow-of-a-Leaf had borne me through the West So that the sunset changed into the dawn, I saw him in his youth. The large salt wind, The creak of cordage, the wild swash of waves Were round him as he paced the clear white deck, An odd loose-tweeded sojourner, in a world Of uniforms and guns. The _Beagle_ plunged Westward, upon the road that Drake had sailed; But this new voyager, on a longer quest, Sailed on a stranger sea; and, though I heard His ringing laugh, he seemed to live apart In his own mind, from all who moved around him. I saw him while the _Beagle_ basked at anchor Under West Indian palms. He lounged there, tanned With sun; tall, lankier in his cool white drill; The big slouched straw pulled down to shade his eyes. The stirring wharf was one bright haze of colour; Kaleidoscopic flakes, orange and green, Blood-red and opal, glancing to and fro, Through purple shadows. The warm air smelt of fruit.

He leaned his elbows on the butt of a gun And listened, while a red-faced officer, breathing Faint whiffs of rum, expounded lazily, With loosely stumbling tongue, the cynic’s code His easy rule of life, belying the creed That both professed. And, in one flash, I caught A glimpse of something deeper, missed by both,— The subtle touch of the Master-Ironist Unfolding his world-drama, point by point, In every sight and sound and word and thought, Packed with significance. Out of its myriad scenes All moving swiftly on, unguessed by man, To close in one great climax of clear light, This vivid moment flashed. The cynic ceased; And Darwin, slowly knitting his puzzled brows, Answered, “_But it is wrong!_” “Wrong?” chuckled the other. “Why should it be wrong?” And Darwin, Darwin,—he that was to grasp The crumbling pillars of their infidel Temple And bring them headlong down to the honest earth, Answered again, naïvely as a child, “_Does not the Bible say so?_” A broad grin Wreathed the red face that stared into his own; And, later, when the wardroom heard the jest, The same wide grin from Christian mouth to mouth Spread like the ripples on a single pool Quietly enough! They liked him. They’d not hurt him! And Darwin, strange, observant, simple soul, Saw clearly enough; had eyes behind his back For every smile; though in his big slow mind He now revolved a thought that greatly puzzled him, A thought that, in their light sophistication, These humorists had not guessed. Once, in his cabin, His red-faced cynic had picked up a book By one whose life was like a constant light On the high altar of Truth. He had read a page, Then flung it down, with a contemptuous oath, Muttering, “These damned atheists! Why d’you read them?” Could pagan minds be stirred, then, to such wrath Because the man they called an “atheist” smiled At dates assigned by bland ecclesiasts To God for His creation? _Man was made_ _On March the ninth, at ten o’clock in the morning_ _(A Tuesday), just six thousand years ago_: A legend of a somewhat different cast From that deep music of the first great phrase In _Genesis_. The strange irony here struck home. For Darwin, here, was with the soul-bowed throng Of prophets, while the ecclesiasts blandly toyed With little calendars, which his “atheist’s book,” In its irreverence, whispered quite away; Whispered (for all such atheists bend their heads Doubtless in shame) that, in the Book of Earth, Six thousand years were but as yesterday, A flying cloud, a shadow, a breaking wave. Million of years were written upon the rocks That told its history. To upheave one range Of mountains, out of the sea that had submerged So many a continent, ere mankind was born, The harnessed forces, governed all by law, Had laboured, dragging down and building up, Through distances of Time, unthinkable As those of starry space. It dared to say (This book so empty of mystery and awe!) That, searching the dark scripture of the rocks, It found therein no sign of a beginning, No prospect of an end. Strange that the Truth, Whether upheld by the pure law within Or by the power of reason, thus dismayed These worshippers of a little man-made code. Alone there in his cabin, with the books Of Humboldt, Lyell, Herschel, spread before him. He made his great decision. If the realm Beyond the bounds of human knowledge gave So large a sanctuary to mortal lies, Henceforth his Bible should be one inscribed Directly with the law—the Book of Earth.

III

THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS

I saw him climbing like a small dark speck —Fraught with what vast significance to the world— Among the snow-capt Andes, a dark point Of travelling thought, alone upon the heights, To watch the terrible craters as they breathed Their smouldering wrath against the sky. I saw him, Pausing above Portillo’s pass to hear The sea-like tumult, where brown torrents rolled Innumerable thousands of rough stones, Jarring together, and hurrying all one way. He stood there, spellbound, listening to the voice Of Time itself, the moments hurrying by For ever irrecoverably. I heard His very thought. The stones were on their way To the ocean that had made them; every note In their wild music was a prophecy Of continents unborn. When he had seen Those continents in embryo, beds of sand And shingle, cumulant on the coastwise plains, Thousands of feet in thickness, he had doubted Whether the river of time itself could grind And pile such masses there. But when he heard The mountain-torrents rattling, he recalled How races had been born and passed away, And night and day, through years unreckonable, These grinding stones had never ceased to roll On their steep course. Not even the Cordilleras, Had they been ribbed with adamant, could withstand That slow sure waste. Even those majestic heights Would vanish. Nothing—not the wind that blows Was more unstable than the crust of the earth.

He landed at Valdivia, on the day When the great earthquake shuddered through the hills From Valparaiso, southward to Cape Horn. I saw him wandering through a ruined city Of Paraguay, and measuring on the coast The upheaval of new land, discovering rocks Ten feet above high-water, rocks with shells For which the dark-eyed panic-stricken throngs Had dived at ebb, a few short days ago. I saw him—strange discoverer—as he sailed Through isles, not only uncharted, but newborn, Isles newly arisen and glistening in the sun, And atolls where he thought an older height Had sunk below the smooth Pacific sea.

He explored the Pampas; and before him passed The centuries that had made them; the great streams Gathering the red earth at their estuaries In soft rich deltas, till new plains of loam Over the Banda granite slowly spread, And seeds took root and mightier forests towered, Forests that human foot could never tread, Forests that human eye could never see; But by the all-conquering human mind at last Trodden and seen, waving their leaves in air As at an incantation, And filled once more with monstrous forms of life.

He found their monstrous bones embedded there, And, as he found them, all those dry bones lived. I stole beside him in the dark, and heard, In the unfathomable forest deeps, the crash Of distant boughs, a wild and lonely sound, Where Megatherium, the gigantic Sloth Whose thigh was thrice an elephant’s in girth, Rose, blindly groping, and with armoured hands Tore down the trees to reach their tender crests And strip them of their more delicious green. I saw him pondering on the secret bond Between the living creatures that he found On the main coast, and those on lonely isles; Forms that diverged, and yet were closely akin. One key, one only, unlocked the mystery there.

Unless God made, for every separate isle As it arose, new tribes of plants, birds, beasts, In variant images of the tribes He set Upon their nearest continent, grading all By time, and place, and distance from the shore, The bond between them was the bond of blood. All, all had branched from one original tree.

I saw him off the Patagonian coast Staring at something stranger than a dream. There, on a rocky point above the ship With its world-voyaging thoughts, he first beheld Primeval man. There, clustering on the crags, Backed by their echoing forests of dark beech, The naked savages yelled at the white sails, Like wolves that bay the moon. They tossed their arms Wildly through their long manes of streaming hair, Like troubled spirits from an alien world. Whence had they risen? From what ancestral night? What bond of blood was there? What dreadful Power Begot them—fallen or risen—from heaven or hell?

I saw him hunting everywhere for light On life’s dark mystery; gathering everywhere Armies of fact, that pointed all one way, And yet—what _vera causa_ could he find In blindfold Nature? Even had he found it, What æons would be needed! Earth was old; But could the unresting loom of infinite time Weave this wild miracle, or evolve one nerve Of all this intricate network in the brain, This exquisite machine that looked through heaven, Revelled in colours of a sunset sky, Or met love’s eyes on earth? Everywhere, now, He found new clues that led him all one way. And, everywhere, in the record of the rocks, Time and to spare for all that Time could do, But not his _vera causa_. Earth grew strange. Even in the ghostly gleam that told the watch One daybreak that the ship was nearing home He saw those endless distances again.... He saw through mist, over the struggling waves That run between the white-chalk cliffs of France And England, sundered coasts that once were joined And clothed with one wide forest. The deep sea Had made the strange white body of that broad land, Beautifully establishing it on death, Building it, inch by inch, through endless years Out of innumerable little gleaming bones, The midget skeletons of the twinkling tribes That swarmed above in the more lucid green Ten thousand fathoms nearer to the sun. There they lived out their gleam of life and died, Then slowly drifted down into the dark, And spread in layers upon the cold sea-bed The invisible grains and flakes that were their bones. Layer on layer of flakes and grains of lime, Where life could never build, they built it up By their incessant death. Though but an inch In every thousand years, they built it up, Inch upon inch, age after endless age; And the dark weight of the incumbent Deep Compressed them (Power determined by what Will?) Out of the night that dim creation rose The seas withdrew. The bright new land appeared. Then Gaul and Albion, nameless yet, were one; And the wind brought a myriad wingèd seeds, And the birds carried them, and the forests grew, And through their tangled ways the tall elk roared. But sun and frost and rain, the grinding streams And rhythmic tides (the tools of what dread Hand?) Still laboured on; till, after many a change, The great moon-harnessed energies of the sea Came swinging back, the way of the southwest wind, And, æon after æon, hammering there, Rechannelled through that land their shining way. There all those little bones now greet the sun In gleaming cliffs of chalk; and, in their chines The chattering jackdaw builds, while overhead On the soft mantle of turf the violet wakes In March, and young-eyed lovers look for Spring. What of the Cause? O, no more rounded creeds Framed in a realm where no man could refute them! Honesty, honesty, honesty, first of all. And so he turned upon the world around him, The same grave eyes of deep simplicity With which he had faced his pagan-christian friends And quoted them their Bible.... Slowly he marshalled his worldwide hosts of fact, Legions new-found, or first assembled now, In their due order. Lyell had not dared To tell the truth he knew. He found in earth The records of its vanished worlds of life, Each with its own strange forms, in its own age, Sealed in its own rock-system. In the first, The rocks congealed from fire, no sign of life; And, through the rest, in order as they were made, From oldest up to youngest, first the signs Of life’s first gropings; then, in gathering power, Strange fishes, lizards, birds, and uncouth beasts, Worlds of strange life, but all in ordered grades, World over world, each tombed in its own age Or merging into the next with subtle changes, Delicate modulations of one form, (Urged by what force? Impelled by what dark power?) Progressing upward, into subtler forms Through all the buried strata, till there came Forms that still live, still fight for life on earth, Tiger and wolf and ape; and, last of all, The form of man; the child of yesterday. Of yesterday! For none had ever found Among the myriad forms of older worlds, Locked in those older rocks through tracts of time Out-spanning thought, one vestige of mankind. There was no human footprint on the shores Whose old compacted sand, now turned to stone, Still showed the ripples where a summer sea Once whispered, ere the mastodon was born. There were the pitted marks, all driven one way, That showed how raindrops fell, and the west wind blew. There on the naked stone remained the tracks Where first the sea-beasts crawled out of the sea, A few salt yards upon the long dark trail That led through æons to the tidal roar Of lighted cities and this world of tears. The shell, the fern, the bird’s foot, the beast’s claw, Had left their myriad signs. Their forms remained, Their delicate whorls, their branching fronds, their bones, Age after age, like jewels in the rocks; But, till the dawning of an age so late, It seemed like yesterday, no sign, no trace, No relic of mankind! Then, in that age Among the skulls, made equal in the grave, Of ape and wolf, last of them all, looked up That naked shrine with its receding brows, And its two sightless holes, the skull of man. Round it, his tools and weapons, the chipped flints, The first beginnings of his fight for power, The first results of his first groping thought Proclaimed his birth, the youngest child of time. _Born, and not made?_ Born—of what lesser life? Was man so arrogant that he could disdain The words he used so glibly of his God— _Born, and not made?_ Could Lyell, who believed That, in the world around us, we should find The self-same causes and the self-same laws To-day as yesterday; and throughout all time; And that the Power behind all changes works By law alone; law that includes all heights, All depths, of reason, harmony, and love; Could Lyell hold that all those realms of life, Each sealed apart in its own separate age, With its own separate species, had been called Suddenly, by a special Act of God, Out of the void and formless? Could he think Even that mankind, this last emergent form, After so many æons of ordered law, Was by miraculous Hands in one wild hour, Suddenly kneaded out of the formless clay? And was the formless clay more noble, then, Than this that breathed, this that had eyes to see, This whose dark heart could beat, this that could die? No! Lyell knew that this wild house of flesh Was never made by hands, not even those Hands; And that to think so were to discrown God, And not to crown Him, as the blind believed. The miracle was a vaster than they knew. The law by which He worked was all unknown; Subtler than music, quieter than light, The mighty process that through countless changes, Delicate grades and tones and semi-tones, Out of the formless slowly brought forth forms, Lifeless as crystals, or translucent globes Drifting in water; till, through endless years, Out of their myriad changes, one or two More subtle in combination, at the touch Of light began to move, began to attract Substances that could feed them; blindly at first; But as an artist, with all heaven for prize, Pores over every syllable, tests each thread Of his most tenuous thought, the moving Power Spent endless æons of that which men call Time, To form one floating tendril that could close On what it touched. Who whispered in his ear That fleeting thought? We must suppose a Power Intently watching—through all the universe— Each slightest variant, seizing on the best, Selecting them, as men by conscious choice In their small realm selected and reshaped Their birds and flowers. We must suppose a Power In that immense night-cleaving pageantry Which men call Nature, a selective Power, Choosing through æons as men choose through years.