Part 5

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

VI

It was the old clerk, of whose services and devotion to our parish I have previously written, who gave the Biblical name to the little village that lies near the boundary of the great city that is steadily creeping towards us, and ever threatening to engulf us. Its own name is singularly pleasant to the ear and redolent of the sound of running waters, but it is unnecessary to burden the memory with it. Though it is now many years ago, I remember, as it were yesterday, the first time I heard the word on the old clerk's lips. I was sitting warming myself by the fire in the ticket-collector's office. The ticket-collector was ostensibly waiting to provide tickets, but as everybody in our parish has a season ticket, that part of his duty is almost a sinecure.

Thus it happens that the ticket-collector has leisure, just before the trains pass through, to give his friends the fruits of his researches in the realms of philosophy. That particular day he was speaking of the changes he had seen. "I was brought up," said he, closing his argument, "on the Shorter Catechism and porridge. I dinna haud any longer by the Catechism, but I havena lost my faith in porridge."

It was then that the clink of coppers was heard on the sill of the ticket window. In the aperture was framed the face of the clerk, with the trimmed grey beard and the small twinkling eyes. He held three pennies deftly in his thumbless hand. "Return, Sodom," said he. The ticket-collector pushed back his cap, stretched out his right hand as if he were beginning to speak, then thought better of it. Out of his case, without a word, he produced a return ticket for Sodom, clinked it in his machine, and passed it through the window. The old clerk received it with a grim chuckle.

Away below the bridge there came a rumble. "Train," said the ticket-collector, closing the aperture with a snap, and making for the door. And I have never forgotten the hoarse voice of the old clerk with an acid edge to it as he clinked his three coppers, saying "Return, Sodom."

***

It is an amazing thing how within the circuit of the same parish, removed by one mile from one another, there can live together two eras so remote from each other in the order of human development, as the world of the red-roofed houses on the slopes of the hills, and the village at their base where the gorge, worn by the little river through the travail of immemorial centuries, debouches on the great central plain that runs across Scotland.

Every morning the dwellers on the slopes are borne by the railway on a great span of arches over the little village, and they look down on the roofs of its houses. On the slopes there lies the world in which the fringes of life are embroidered--a world where men and women talk of books, pictures and plays. It is a world of hyphenated names. But in all the village there is not so much as one hyphenated name. It is a refuse-heap of humanity. Many diverse races are crowded in it. The city fathers clean out slums without providing first for the slum-dwellers, and, swept before the broom of so-called social reformers, homeless men and women have drifted to the village, and there reconstituted their slum.

From the glens of the north broken Highlanders, driven out to make room for sheep, have drifted hither to work in the quarries, and the speech of their children's children still bears the trace of their ancient language pure and clean; over the sea Irishmen have come to reap the harvest fields of the Lothians, and they have been deposited by the tide in the village. Stray Poles have come hither and straggling Czechs; a man from Connemara neighbours a shaggy giant from Lewis; and a dour stone-cutter from Aberdeen is door by door with an Italian who sells what looks like a deadly mixture from a hand-cart.

Here you can see humanity in its primitive state, before it began to adorn the fringes of life, and make for itself sanctuaries of privacy. Between the slopes and the base of the hill there yawns an invisible chasm. Centuries separate them. Thus it comes that the slope-dweller passes on the top of the arches, scanning his newspaper, without so much as seeing the huddle of houses which constitute the village.

It is only a week ago that, like the old clerk, I took out a return ticket for the "Cities of the Plain." (For the old clerk had a two-fold formula. When he was going to one village he said, "Return, Sodom," but when he meant to go to the quarries beside the village he said, "Return, Cities of the Plain.") It was to visit an old soldier that I thus descended into the plains. He lives in a rookery in which many families are crowded one on the top of the other--a rabbit-warren infested by many and strange odours. He used to come up the slopes and do odd jobs, tidying up gardens, and he loved to talk of

"unhappy far-off things And battles long ago,"

in a language which I also could speak. So I got to know him. And as I sat by his bed I heard a moan from the adjoining room. It began in a low cry, and then rose into a wail that seemed charged with all the woes of humanity. The old man sat up in bed trembling. The cry of woe now changed into a chorus; other voices swelled it. It was the act of a moment to open the door, and in the dim landing find the door of this other room.

I opened it, and there I saw three children huddled before a grate which contained nothing but ashes. On an iron bed, stretched on straw, lay a woman sunk in sleep.... A foetid air was laden with the fumes of alcohol.... There was no food.... A broken chair, a stool or two, and a box that did duty for a table.... The old soldier told me what to do, and I did it. A kindly woman brought coal and food, and the wailing was silenced. The old man explained it all. The woman sunk in the stupor is the wife of a soldier now in the trenches. She did not belong to our parish; but only came a week or two before, swept before the broom of the "social reformers" from the city. The mothers of the Parish, the old soldier declared, were heroines. One such, when her son asked her consent to enlist, said, "Eh, laddie, I dinna want ye to gang; I dinna want ... but if I were ye I wud gang mysel'." Our own wives and mothers were splendid--but those who came from the city, flotsam and jetsam borne on the tide, staying for a little and then carried away again, of whom there were three or four in the village--these were different. They meet each other eager for news. They are depressed, and feel the need for cheering. One suggests a stimulant ... and the result is this.

He is no Puritan--the old soldier lying on his bed, his campaigning done--and he spoke out of an understanding heart. It was only poor human nature, overtaken by thick darkness and misery, trying to open a window towards the realm of sunshine.

And I came out into the roadway and turned towards the station. I did not see them before, but I saw them now. A few yards separating them, I pass two shops licensed to sell the means for opening windows towards this realm of happiness; and two houses with gaudy lights called the villagers to enter the region where all cares and worries are forgotten. In the street pale-faced, ill-clad children played at being soldiers, marching with heads erect. The gorge was already dark with the evening shadows, but the lamps in the village were lit.

When the village was passed I stood and looked back. In the west the setting sun had thrown over the heavens a glow. A well of liquid fire glowed over Torfionn, and its rays spread fan-like, so that they spanned the horizon, and, touching the rounded mass of Corstarfin, went forth over the firth. Against this background stood silhouetted the great arches that carry the railway across the hollow, and behind these the arches that bear the canal. The piers stood as a gigantic forest. These mighty arches might have been the work of the Romans. A soft, luminous haze fell on the village. Window after window was lit up. The door of a cottage near me was opened, and a flood of light streamed out. A woman stood in the door, and looking up the road shouted "Jim," and a little boy, leaving his fellow-soldiers, rushed to her, and she clasped him in her arms and closed the door.... In that moment the little village seemed to me as if it were an outpost of Paradise. Nature threw as a benediction the mantle of its loveliness over it. What nature meant to be a sanctuary of beauty, man had changed into Sodom.

***

The ticket-collector stood at his post and scanned the passengers as they went through. He knew them all, and had only a stray ticket to collect. I was last, and duly gave up my "return" from the "Cities of the Plain." But he did not let me through the gate. "I want to show you something," said the ticket-collector, and he led me into his office and produced a pamphlet.

"I got it from the man who goes to Keswick," said the ticket-collector; "you know him." I knew him, the best of men.

"Nae doubt," went on the ticket-collector; "nae doubt. He was always giving me tracts. Tracts--faugh!--poor stuff, nae style, nae logic, and nae philosophee in them. But I aye took them and thanked him--for he is a nice man, though a perfect babe in matters of understanding. And I found them useful for spills. The other day he handed me this..." and he waved a blue paper-covered booklet.

"Mahn," he exclaimed, pushing his peaked cap back from his grey head, and sweeping his brass buttons down with his hand; "mahn, this has fair hit me between the eyes." Then he opened the pamphlet and began to read passages that he had heavily scored with blue pencil. The Czar has abolished the sale of vodka for ever! What is the result?

"The old women in the villages," read the ticket-collector, "can hardly believe their own eyes, so changed are their menfolk.... Everywhere peace, kindness and industry. War is said to be hell; but this is like a foretaste of heaven."

"Listen to this," cried the collector, his arm outstretched. "A newspaper correspondent writes, since the sale of vodka stopped the old night population (in the doss-houses) seems to have vanished." Every passage he read bore the same testimony.

"And what are we doing?" he exclaimed. "We have stopped nothing; we surround our soldiers with the old temptations, and we leave their defenceless wives exposed to the same temptations; I know all about it. Mahn, it was Ruskin that said, 'There is no wealth but life,' and we leave all our wealth of life at the mercy of every evil. It's a fair scandal. Do you ken the conclusion I've come to! It is that the best form of government is a benevolent despotism. Oor men are afraid of this and that--losing votes--but an autocrat with a stroke of a pen can sweep away the power of hell. If they would only make King George an autocrat for a few years.... That would be grand!"

He insisted on lending me the blue-covered pamphlet, and it being his hour off he walked with me across the bridge. The valley was now dark. The snuff-manufacturer's house down below was wrapped in gloom. Lights twinkled on the slopes. Below a lamp-post at the far end of the bridge two men stood. When he saw them the ticket-collector stood fast.

"Mahn," said he, "I've come to a great resolution. I'm too old to fight; and they canna get at me in ony way. No Income-tax for me; and threepence on the tea is naething, for I never take it; I want to feel that I am worth men dying for me; and I am going to be tee-total till the end of the war. I'll give the money to help the soldiers' weans. It's the weans that pull at my heart-strings."

And he turned on his heel and walked rapidly back across the bridge.

Under the lamp-post stood the roadman and the beadle, looking after him. I spoke to them, for since the war began we all speak to each other in our parish.

"Has he forgotten ony thin'?" asked the roadman, waving a hand towards the retreating form of the ticket-collector.

"I don't think so," I answered, "he just said that he was going to be tee-total till the end of the war."

"Tee-total!" echoed the roadman mournfully; "there gangs anither lost soul!"

My two friends went sadly down the steep brae, and I turned up the long flight of stone steps that leads to the road above. On the top of the first flight I turned and looked after them. When they came opposite the door of the village inn, they slowed down ... and then went resolutely past, down into the hollow. The two of them have probably resolved to join the company of the "lost souls."

***

I have read the ticket-collector's pamphlet, and I feel a little dazed. It is such an odd world, and the strange thing is that I never realised its queerness before. A Grand Duke is murdered in a place of which I never heard before, and whose name I cannot even now trust myself to write down correctly, and here, a thousand miles away, the result is that I am brought face to face for the first time with the problem that lay twice a day under my feet--the problem of the Cities of the Plain. A flood of light seems to have fallen on things which were aforetime hazy. Events stand out luridly and arrestingly. Here is one. I was in a far Hebridean isle when war broke out. All of a sudden there sounded the drum,

"Saying Come, Freemen, come, Ere your heritage be wasted! said the quick alarming drum."

And the manhood of the island sprang to their feet. Mothers gave their sons, sending them away with sobs and tears, but in the name of God.

On a drizzling morning the little steamer lay at the pier, crowded with men and horses, going out to fight and die. The hawsers were loosed. The steamer churned and backed and crept away. A girl stood near me crying softly. A youth with clean-cut features, and the yearning no tongue can utter shining in his eyes, leant over the taffrail and called to her, "Not crying, Jessie?" And she wiped her cheek with the moist handkerchief, and turned a smiling face to him and said, "No, I am not crying." And the paddles churned faster, and they passed into the drizzle and the haze. Weeks later I read how one man of that regiment--the regiment of my own county--killed another ... and a few days later I read that he had done so in a drunken brawl. He was not from the island, that man, and I know not who he is. His mother doubtless sent him forth to fight as a hero for his King, and he became a murderer under the fostering of the State.