CHAPTER XXV

EARTH CHILDREN

I

Their house is a small russet cave of three dim compartments--part of a farmhouse, the rest having fallen to ruin, and from human hands to the starlings, the sparrows, and the rats. No one will live in it again. Inside, it is held together by the solid poetry of their lives, by gay-coloured, cheerful, tradesmen’s pictures of well-dressed children and blooming horsewomen, and the dogs of gentlemen, memorial cards of the dead, a few photographs, some picture post-cards pasted over flaws in the wall, and the worn furniture of several disconnected generations. The old man’s tools in the kitchen are noble--the heavy wrought iron, two-toothed hoe, that falls pleasantly upon the hard clay and splits it without effort and without jarring the hand, its ash handle worn thin where his hand has glided at work, a hand that nothing will wear smooth; the glittering, yellow handled spades and forks; the disused shovel with which he boasts regretfully that he could dig his garden when he lived on deep loam in a richer country than this; and still the useless “hop-idgit” of six tynes--the Sussex “shim”--which he retains to remind others, and perhaps himself, that he was a farmer once. He had twenty or thirty acres and a few cows. The cows all died in one year and he became a labourer.

His wife remembers those days. She was a tall woman and stooped at the doorway thatch: now she cannot rise to it. For every day she went many times to the sweet brook, a quarter of a mile away, rather than take the grey liquor of the pond for her cows. That is how she came to be bent like an oak branch on which children swing, or like a thorn that knows the west wind on the hill or the shore. Now she cannot carry a pail, for it would sweep the ground. She cannot see the apples in autumn until they have fallen to her feet. Her flesh seems to have assumed an animal sweetness, for her bees will cluster on the brown hands. Birds and beasts take to her as to an old tree, though she has pity for them, but no love. Sometimes as she sits at her door the robins come fearlessly close to her--hedge-sparrows, too, if there is nobody else near, and even the partridges that come for the ants in the old dock roots. She watches them with her dull eye and seems easily to have found a Franciscan friendliness when, as if angry with the creatures for seeing her frailty, she stamps her feet and drives them away. Then she relents and tries her power, as if she has half persuaded herself that it is a happy talent. She will crush a mouse in her fingers, and yet they still run over her in their merry business night or day, as they would over a tree that has fallen, and proved fatal to some of them in its death. Yet, in spite of her apparent indifference, I think that she knows the animals more than we who patronise them. Left alone with a cat, she shows, indeed, none of the endearments of a civilised woman, but quietly concedes and demands concessions very much as when a horse and some cows are sheltering from the heat together in a limited shade.

She speaks hardly ever, except with animals. But in church her lips move long after others are tired of “have mercy upon us.”

“Lord!” she says, “you are very kind, but your children are very many. All the sparrows in my garden have to be tended, and I suppose the mice, the moles, the worms, the lizards, the shining things that run and fly and crawl, and all the flowers, trees and birds. Oh! Lord, I had seventeen children and among so many you seemed not to notice some, and they died just anyhow in their happiness, and perhaps then you have forgotten me altogether, and I shall not even be taken away. I have heard that the good shall prosper. You have said it yourself. But I know not what is good or what is prosperity. For what am I? I am willing to learn, yet I am not taught. Am I good? Am I prospering? Lord! what am I to do? There are thousands and thousands of strong and rich and beautiful and happy things in the world, but as for me, I seem to crawl about among them in darkness like a mole. Nevertheless, glory to God the father, Lord of all, though you have done some things that I would not have done, and as to the weather ... but I know not your designs. Glory to the Son though he has long been dead, he was a good man. Glory to the Holy Ghost, which I do believe in, though they say there are no ghosts really. I am a poor old woman, born in Scotland, and a Scotswoman still. My name is Margaret Helen Page, and I live at the Hoath Cottage in the wood, at the end of the lane, where you turn up by ‘The Blue Anchor,’ in going to Horsmonden. There I shall abide and am to be found there, except on Sunday evening in fine weather, when I come to this holy place. Oh, come, Lord, when you have looked after all the sparrows, some day, and take me.”

“If,” she said once, “if God’s a Christian man, I do not know what he means by this weather.”

“I reckon he manages about as well as could be expected in such a funny world,” replied her husband. “Remember old Farmer King who used to swear at the weather so. One day when he had got his hay dry at last and saw it coming on to rain, he picks up a handful and stuffs it into his pocket, and says he will carry that much home dry at any rate, but if he didn’t fall into the brook on his way back and get wet to the skin. Such are the ways of God.”

But she was not convinced, for, with all her feebleness of body and conversation, she proves that man is older than Christ and Buddha, than Jehovah and Jupiter, and that not even such presences on the earth have left behind footpaths in which he can wander in security. She compels us to realise, if we have not done so before, that if we could isolate the child of Christian parents on a solitary island away from all religious influences, he would grow into something curiously different from a Christian, and something marvellously ancient too. Her language, stripped of its tattered and scanty Christianisms, and her acts, without that Sunday journey, reveal the multitude’s eternal paganism, which religions ruffle and sink into again--the paganism of the long-lived, most helpless, proudest and loneliest of animals, contending with winter and bad weather, with accident and disease and strange fears; rejoicing in fine weather, in strength, in the appetites; hating decay; distrusting the inhumanity of the heavens and animals and men from other climates; uncertain, troubled, and thinking little, about the future. For her the world is a flat place, decorated with a pattern of familiar and other fields, with hills, rivers, houses, a sea, a London, a Highland valley of children and old-fashioned ways, and infinitely far off towards the sunset, lands of tigers, monkeys, snakes, strange trees and flowers and men, with earthquakes, volcanoes, huge storms, all lit by sun and moon and stars--and a heaven also and a hell. Very real to her is the snow and the thaw-drip from the roof, the dry heat of summer, the apple blossom, the coming of the swallows, the growth of carrots, potatoes, cabbages and weeds, the coming home of her husband sober or drunk, the use of a few silver coins week by week, the announcement that old Mrs. Fuller is dead or that Mrs. Rixon has another child, the cold at four o’clock on a January morning and the warmth all night in July as she sits sleeping, because of her doubled back, like the corpse of a caveman in his grave, the endlessness of days when she is alone and has nothing to do but to remember and try to remember. She has no hopes, no purposes. I have seen her picking up oak branches in May after the fall of the great trees, and she will go on after her arms are filled, adding to the pile from above, and at the same time losing others from the sides, until at last it is dark and she goes home. Even so she does in life, accumulating memories and affairs, and letting them fall, until the end. Yet it is a little hard that there should be no kindly god or goddess to deceive her and receive her prayers and sanctify her little unnecessary acts, that the very wood at night, round about the house, is merely dark and full of sounds and no home for her. The beautiful Jewish stories told to her by clergymen of some birth and education, though she will gladly listen to them, are little better than ribands for oak faggots--for, though a Pagan, she has no gods. The gods of this part of the earth have long been hurled into Tartarus and bolted there in that grotesque company which the prophets of the ages have gathered together. And so she goes through life, like a child in a many-windowed house, looking on sea and barren land, and full of corridors, resounding and silent by hours, with dim, enormous apartments, bolted doors, and here and there a picture, a skeleton, an old toy, a reminiscent voice....

II

Compared with Margaret Helen Page, her husband, Robert, is a citizen of the world. He knows all the farmers in the neighbourhood, thatching for one, haymaking for another, gardening, woodcutting, washing or pole-pulling in the hop-garden for others. He can even make the beautiful, five-barred gates, with their noble top bars, tapered and shaped like a gun-stock and barrel. All the inns are known to him, and the labourers and wayfaring men who resort to them. He will gossip, and the rich do not disdain to listen to the fabrications and selections which he mixes charmingly for them alone. The workhouse or death is not more than a few years ahead of him, for he stoops with difficulty and will make haste for no man; yet he will cheerfully quarrel with a farmer in the middle of the winter, pick up his coat, take his wages and go off to the inn and drink all that he has; if the farmer grumbles in September that Robert has been taking merely an honest bushel of hops from the pickers he will not give way to the extent of a handful. No one can thatch as he can. His tall haystacks look like churches when they are new, and so they remain. The roofs of his cornricks are shaped like breasts, with convex curves that make the same lines against the sky as you walk round. His vegetable plots are invariably as flat as lawns, their sides evenly sloping to the paths. He stops in the midst of his work and smokes and thinks; and he expects to be paid for his thinking. In the spring he catches moles, hanging them up on the briers or thorns with great care, twisting the twigs round them so that they stay until fur and bone are indistinguishable and break up into dust.

At the inns he hears the gossip of the universe, heaping up as in a marine store the details of murders, swindles, divorces, expensive pictures of Venus, etc., horse races, cricket matches, letters from archbishops and literary men, distant wars, new foods and diseases and cures, automobiles, the cost of rich men’s dinners, how to live happily, the extravagance of the poor, how to feed on a shilling a week. These things are “in print” and therefore true. But he utters no opinion of his own. He consents to exchange his recollections and to accept others; then he sinks into the happy silence of those who have not the gift of ratiocination. What dark, undisturbed depths of personality are his--immense depths yielding to the upper world, now and then, an ejaculation, as Gilbert White’s well yielded a black lizard at times.

“I wonder,” he ejaculated once, “I wonder what God did with himself before he made such a kettle of fish as this world.”

Again, “Now supposing that all these things in the Bible about Adam and the beginning had never been written down, and we had not been told that God did it, what should we have done? Should we have found out these things for ourselves?”

Once he related a dream:--

“Sometimes when I am all alone, and my old girl says the same, it seems to me that I am not of much account; it is as if I had been forgotten and left off the register, and how will it be at the Judgment Day? Sometimes I think to myself, It will be fine sleeping and never hearing the blessed trumpet and getting into that crowd. But one night I dreamed that I had died and was up above, and that an angel woke me up and asked me to take his trumpet, because he wanted a bit of sleeping after waiting ever since Adam’s time, and I was to blow it at twelve o’clock and then it would be Judgment Day. Well, as he looked like a gentleman, I said I would and I took the trumpet and stared at it a bit, because it was that trumpet that was to wake the dead for the Judgment Day. I was wide awake and I could see the dead all round me, more of them than there are mangolds in twenty acres. Close to me were the angels, and they were all asleep, worn out with waiting so long, I suppose. They had wings like peacocks and owls and orpingtons--beautiful! I enjoyed myself. But when it got near to twelve o’clock I got a bit anxious. The angel was fast asleep and I did not see why I should wake him up, or anybody else. Once or twice I put the trumpet to my lips, but I thought--No, I would sleep myself and there would be no Judgment Day. But I could not sleep for thinking of the keeper who used to kill my old girl’s cats as fast as they grew up and went into the woods at night; and, without thinking what I was at, I blew the trumpet and what with the terrible noise and the sight of all these poor people waking up I awoke myself and my old girl said that I had made a noise like a trumpet in my sleep. But it did seem a pity that they should all wake up just as if they had to go to ploughing and all that again.”

But Bacchus is his only god, who has already given him many gifts. On Friday nights he is as a child upon the throne, holding himself wonderfully straight on the settle at the inn, never letting go of the tankard except to have it filled, and smiling delicately with weary eyes, as he drinks the six ale--

“Much more of price and of more gratious powre In this, then that same water of Ardenne, The which Rinaldo drunck in happie howre, Described by that famous Tuscan penne: For that had might to change the hearts of men From love to hate, a change of evil choise: But this doth hatred make in love to brenne, And heavy heart with comfort doth rejoyce. Who would not to this vertue rather yeeld his voice?”

At such times he speaks little, except a few words of nonsense to strangers who come in; but he smiles continually, as if he had forgiven all things, and even as if he silently preached forgiveness to all the world. His tenderness to children and animals is wonderful. He would pass as a saint, an angelic doctor, or even something higher. To some, indeed, he might seem to be the original from which field artists have everywhere modelled the scarecrow. The young men recognise the resemblance and smile. The older men perhaps see in him an apotheosis of themselves, more twisted, more starved, greener in the hat and coat, and they do not smile. He has a lean, acorn-coloured face, adorned with relenting blue eyes, small hawk nose, clear-cut shrivelled lips and chin, and fresh brown hair hanging like a lion skin over his head and neck, and curling sumptuously.

I can fancy him a lesser god in some mythology. To him come the weak and ashamed; the shamefaced female tramp who went hungry, having asked for a direction to Maidstone instead of for food, because the farmer’s voice was hard and he was young and strong and her skirt was old and her breast shrunken; and he who looked through the hedge at some fair children playing and then, because one of them screamed at catching sight of him in searching for a nest, raised a hideous cry and sent them terrified away; the curst, scandalous lean maid who melts with momentary tenderness over her starved and piebald cat, and calls him “Prettiest”; all such as are foolish and slow of thought and slower of speech, and laugh at what they love because others do and then weep in solitude; those who, unable to care for anything much, grow ardent in a simulated affection and blush when a cruel strong one finds them out; those who know not what they desire except a little tranquillity before the end and know that they shall not obtain it; the drunken and obscene who are without graces, but also without repentance; those who vainly complain and fret about the evils which they have deserved and cannot endure; those who cannot keep up with life because of one beautiful or terrible thing in the past; those who mourn, they know not why; the little base ones who admire good and lovely things, and fear to hurt them by approval. And they should come to this god, Robert, as one in whom each saw his little unknown virtue and should be lifted up thereat. They should bring to his altars sour bread and rotten flesh and fruit fallen before its time, and worn-out, shattered things; and his priests, leprous, and scrofulous, and squint-eyed all, should rejoice then and tell the worshippers to be no more cast down, because in this, their god, were to be found all their little virtues, and behold! he endured for ever and looked upon them pitifully and interceded continually with the high gods. Then would they drink until they were thoroughly drunken, and the god would tell them that death came soon, and that their sleep would be heavier than they could dream of, for no king, or judge, or policeman, or clergyman, could ever disturb their sleep, though armed with sharpest swords and most cruel words.