Part 7

February 1. We are living on, as best we may, through cold and thaw and cold again. The horror of that January night, when human beings and birds wakened, with fear dropping from the sky, when innocent women and children were killed by bombs from German Zeppelins, lingers and grows deeper. The tension was greatest for those who could not hear what the birds heard, but listened to the great outcry of blackbirds, pheasants, and other winged things, to the loud cawing of the rooks, and wondered and waited in nameless anguish. There seems to be no refuge in earth or sky or sea. Can this world of shot and shell and conquering chemicals be that world that was so beautiful, and that suddenly seemed so strangely _safe_ when you came into my life?

March 10. Such days of excitement and of strain! My little house has performed its supreme service,--has sheltered a body, while the soul was going out.

It began three days ago; I was walking down the village street with Don at my heels, when I noticed a large touring car at the Inn, with a group of people very much excited, gesticulating and talking with a vehemence that usually means Latin blood. Mine hostess of the Inn was running to and from the car with bottles and flannel cloths; turpentine on warm flannel is her cure for every human ailment. Then I saw in the car an old, old lady--quite ill, evidently--leaning heavily on the shoulder of a younger woman. I shall not soon forget the look of that grey-white face under the snow-white hair and black widow's bonnet, set in a group of strange faces, among which I remember one of a little boy, watching breathlessly with his mouth wide open, and a smaller girl, staring apathetically with her eyes full of tears that looked as if they had long been there. I did not need to be told that this oddly-assorted set of people were refugees. I had seen too many utter strangers, from diverse surroundings, hastily gathered together, clad in velvet, clad in rags, to share one suffering.

I found that they were being taken from London, where they had been cared z many weeks, to different destinations in the northern counties, but the man in charge had evidently lost his way and was making an unnecessary detour toward the coast. He could not speak their language, nor they his, and he seemed entirely at a loss in this dilemma. Oh, the loneliness, and the desolation, and the bitter shame of it all!

"The old lady's took ill, of a sudden, 'm," said the landlady, stopping her little trot near me.

I asked the younger woman, whose face was very kindly, if this was her mother, but she shook her head.

"I don't know who she is; I never saw her until we started."

Then I begged and pleaded; the chauffeur looked greatly relieved, and so did mine hostess, though she remonstrated that it would be quite too much for me.

"Are you sure, Miss, that you want her? We don't know what it is; it may be contagious."

"I don't care what it is!" I said so suddenly that Don barked out; there was a little feeling of joy within me at the thought that there might be danger; it is hard to be shut out from the great danger that circles the world.

So the big touring car was turned about, with much puffing and panting; my little iron gate was opened wide to let two men carry the poor old creature to my guest room, and I sent the others on, with such comforts as I could supply. The small boy went nibbling a cookie, the little girl with hers in her hand, too dazed to eat it. Haven't you ever seen a frightened little bird holding something in its mouth, not daring to swallow?

The village doctor and Madge and I worked for hours over the fugitive. She only looked at us with eyes that had in them all the weariness of the world since the dawn of time. There was evidently no malady; actual physical pain did not seem to be there; only overwhelming mental pain or shock that means destruction of the very forces of life. She was not unconscious, nor was she fully conscious of what was going on around her. The comfort of warm water on her body, the comfort of soothing drink she hardly realized, nor could she swallow, except with great difficulty and reluctance. Just once she stretched herself out at full length with a look of relief, and lay motionless.

I shall never know what weary ways she had trodden in her escape from the swift ruin of war, nor how in her tottering age she had escaped at all. She seemed to be one who, her life long, had walked the same peaceful paths over and over, as her forefathers had done before. Was she one of those who, driven from home and fireside, had lain down in the dust of the road, longing to die? Contagious! Heartbreak does seem contagious in these days; who shall escape? Who can wish to, when other hearts break?

Life can never bring me anything so strange, perhaps it can never bring me anything so wonderful, as this silent companionship with a soul that had almost passed. She did not understand the words I used, but she did understand that we were trying to help her; though her lips were still, her eyes followed us,--eyes full of knowledge that can not come before the last. She did not try to thank us, dwelling in some world of instinctive understanding, making one feel that the long ages of much speaking were folly. She had let go of all tangible things and was no longer aware of time or circumstance; there was no look of fear in her eyes, no look of sorrow; she was done with earth and with feeling, having neither reproaches nor regrets. She had gone beyond pain, beyond joy, beyond those simple human affections that linger to the last, to some region of ultimate peace, or of quiet beyond peace.

The falling of March rain upon the roof; sunshine, with the notes of the returning birds; the cawing of the rooks, and the soft ripple of the brook--even Madge was subdued by the majesty of it all and forgot to rail at the Kaiser, or to storm in misplaced aspirates at the Germans. A world beyond hate was with us, where it was good to be.

The end was hardly different from the days that went before; there was no motion, no outburst, only a quiet ceasing of that which had hardly been breathing. Our departing guest folded her wrinkled hands upon her breast herself, as if to save us trouble, and so I found her. Who was she? Who belonged to her? Where are the children and grandchildren who should have been gathered about her bed?

The doctor and the village nurse took charge of her; when she was ready for burial, more quiet than earth itself,--one never knows quiet until one sees it so,--I put roses beside her; one of the county ladies keeps me supplied from her conservatory. Yet I hesitated; it seemed wrong to recall in this presence any mere tangible and visible beauty, or aught from the world of things. The lovely contours and outlines, the perfume of the roses reproached me, as if I were pursuing her to bring her back to mere self, hampering her escape. With her we seemed to be swept away into some great consciousness that meant relief from individual sorrow,--sharing her rest, a repose so deep that it rested us for all the days to come.

Madge mourned over her as if it were her own mother,--I hardly know why: could it have been merely the three days of trying to care for her? Or was she touched, in some depth of her nature never reached before, by the grandeur of that loneliness?

There was a brief service in the little church on the hill, a sound of song, of praying; but nothing in the burial service could quite express the pathos of that moment when we buried some one's mother, not even knowing her name. We left her in the churchyard, within hearing of the stream, where deep shadows fall on grave after grave. This cold winter grass which grows above the other graves will soon, with the quickening of spring, cover hers also; already it is freshening, and crocuses peep out here and there.

There is no name to put on a stone at her head. It is perhaps at best folly to mark the resting-places of the dead, yet I had a feeling that no token of respect must be lacking, and I begged that an old grey tombstone, standing by the churchyard wall, a stone so old that all that was carved on it has been worn away, might be placed at her head. It has told the passing of one human soul, and shall tell that of another; in its grey, fine-worn beauty it symbolizes the vast impersonality of the end.

I come here now even oftener than I used. Surely death has never appeared so gentle, so much a member of the family, as in these English churchyards with their sweet hominess. It seems fitting that we meet "My sister, the Death of the Body" on these grass-grown paths which wear a look of every day and common happenings. The little river, the lichen-grown stones, the sense of long continuance, give one a feeling that there are no gaps, no fissures between life and death, that the sight of the eyes slips inevitably into the vision of the soul. The sky seems near in England, with the crumbling grey of old Norman tower and churchyard wall touching its veiled blue, and the low white clouds almost within reach; the old home-like look of the flat stones makes one feel as if the sleepers are still, as it were, sitting on the threshold, or on the old bench by the door. There is no sense of distance or separation, no feeling of far away.

It is not sad to leave her here, now when the whole earth seems one great family of the sorrowing, where the children and the grandchildren of many other folk are so near.

May 20. Spring, with the thawing of the icicles, and the sunshine growing warmer on the southern wall of the house,--spring comes back in the old and lovely way to a world never in such anguish before. What an April, to bring the cowardly murder of soldiers in the trenches by volumes of poisonous gas! What a May, to bring the _Lusitania_ massacre of hundreds of innocent men, women, and children at sea! What a Germany, quite, quite mad:

"O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown, The soldier's, scholar's----"

but I am not quoting correctly and am too busy to look up the lines. I dare not even try to speak of my sense of these things; words are lacking to express it, but surely this marks the parting of the ways. To me it seems that the time has come for the nations of the earth--would that my own would join them--to band together once more in a holy crusade and do battle with the Pagan, not for the tomb of our Lord, but for the faith He taught.

As time goes on, I see more clearly what the real England stands for. My mind works slowly, for I am but a practical American; it isn't as if I were a thinker like yourself, who could reason things out on purely intellectual grounds. The war between my great love of England and my indignant sense of things that are wrong gives way to something more impersonal, as I have more chance to see the way in which her customs serve humanity. Complete fulfillment of her great purposes has not yet been achieved, yet surely the human race has got no further: liberty for the individual, fair play,--these watchwords of England are the hope of the human race. What other land could rule many alien peoples and make them so proudly content? As England has kept faith with the past, she has, barring some great mistakes, kept faith with humanity. The recent magnificent bravery of the Canadians in the battles with flaming gas only intensifies the splendour of the voluntary tribute of England's colonies to England in distress. Earth has not seen the like of this empire resting on the will of man; from the four quarters of the globe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, they come sailing swiftly home, counting it great gain to die for that for which she stands. It means that at the heart of England is something too precious to lose, a faith in the working possibility of human freedom. Crude races, races old and outworn, need to learn at her feet the practical way of making good this immemorial hope of the race. Under her rule, the individual has his chance of self-government; if he fails to take it, falling into the net of sloth and old habit as he often does in England, the fault is his own. His individual conscience is left him; he is not compelled to become a soulless cog in a gigantic conscienceless mechanism.

I do not care what Mr. Asquith has done wrong; what Mr. Joseph Chamberlain did wrong; what King George the Third and all the Georges have done or failed to do: I trust this people as I trust no other. Guilty of sins and blunders they may be and are, but the blunder is followed by the honest effort to find again and do the right; you come down always to a groundwork of character, sincerity, integrity. England has been in a way the conscience of the world. What other race-name is a word to conjure with? All over the earth where confusion comes, it is whispered: "The troubles are dying down; the English are drawing near." And in the councils of the world, her voice has been the great arbiter of right and wrong.

No one here now can doubt that England is going through that great anguish wherein the soul of a people is re-born. The unity, the calm, the quickening determination are part of a great spring-time that will lead, God grant, to harvest days of peace. There is slow knitting up of the sinews of war; more and more her sons respond to the call which still leaves them free to choose; old England is getting ready as ever, resolved, incredulous of defeat; the spring knows it; the rooks know it, busy in their elm tree parliament. The great sorrow and the great endeavour have turned the very soil of the country into holy ground. Among my bonfires of spring,--for I like to keep that old, religious rite of purification,--I burned half a dozen volumes of recent English fiction, decadent, erotic; a volume or two of flippant and sensational criticism; and one of affected futurist poetry, or some brand like unto it. They belong to the England whose follies and foibles are being burned in a great fire of affliction; they are not worthy of this great England that is emerging from the flame.

As I write, the tinkle of the English sheep bells from afar comes like the very sound of peace.

February, with the vanishing of the icicles, brought snowdrops and crocuses. All kinds of growing things of which I had not dreamed came peeping up in this old garden: crocuses, purple and gold, grow in a little clump where the wind just fails to reach them; royal daffodils nod and sway, or stand erect and golden, those from new planting outshining the rest. In March the violets were out, and primroses followed; the pony's meadow is full of them, deep in the grass; and these are only a part of the lovely procession of flowers,--bluebells, anemones, and unnumbered others.

To me it seemed that the birds came very early,--birds that are strangers to me, birds that I know; and we were glad once more in the companionship of wings. I was thankful when the swallows came, circling, flying high, flying low; wrens, old friends of mine, are building under my porch roof; a merry little blue tit, a friend quite new, disports himself among the leaves. I have heard the cuckoo calling, calling beyond the stream; you were the first to tell me that this was the cuckoo's note. English larks are very near neighbours; every day I can hear them singing at "heaven's gate."

We have all been as busy as bees since the melting of the snow, humans and animals alike. Back with the first suggestion of warmer sunshine Hengist and Horsa began to crow; alas for William the Conqueror, who will never crow again! and my many queens of the hen-yard began to lay and cackle as boastfully as in times of peace. Every living thing came crawling out of hole and hiding-place and took up its task; the little gingerbread woman came back to the lych gate to sit in the sun; Puck, once more one of the family, as he grazes beyond the stream, trotted merrily to Shepperton again and again to bring seeds and young plants, for I intend to have a garden that will astonish Peter when Peter comes back from the war. It seems to me that there is an added touch of determination in the pony's gait and in the toss of his shaggy head since he became a hero of the war, an upholder of the kingdom, a defender of the faith.

Madge is the busiest of all living things and will not be idle for a moment for fear of "thinking long." Never was there such a be-scrubbed, be-polished, shining house as the little red house! I tremble for my own face when I see her with the soap and sand, the brass polish, the silver polish, the long-handled mop, and the wooden pail. It is Madge with a changed face, with deepening lines between the eyes, a worrying, anxious Madge, who steals the newspaper and reads it in the kitchen before she brings it to me. I cannot help noticing that she talks less and less of the glory of England and more and more about Peter. Laconic post cards with peculiar spelling tell us that Peter is alive and well in the trenches. Peter, because of his old experience as soldier, was allowed to go speedily to the front, and is now at close quarters with the enemy.

In earliest April, the little red house sheltered the grand adventure, the greatest adventure, for death seems safe and easy by the side of the great adventure of being born. I had a whole family quartered here, father, mother, and two small winsome children, boy and girl; we tucked them away where we could. And a wee man-child came into the world during their stay here, with much pomp and circumstance and attendance of mine hostess from the Inn, and of the village doctor, whose lot in life has evidently been to stand helpless and aghast, watching mortals who will venture into a world which seems to be no safe place for them. If it had rested with him, small Jean would have had no chance at all; but Madge and mine hostess came to the rescue, and all went well, on to that first little weird lonely cry.

It was little bigger than the Atom. It slept, during all its first days, a troubled, puckered sleep. Don worshipped it, and whenever it cried, gave an anxious whine or a sharp short bark. In the Atom's loft I unearthed a prehistoric cradle that may have been left by the Danes or the Saxons. Of course I know that rocking is most unhygienic, but I thought that if this little, frightened fugitive mother found any comfort in rocking her baby by the fireside, rock it she should. It isn't, I believe, supposed to injure anything except the brain, and the brain counts for so little nowadays in the contemporary ideal of development that I am sure small Jean will have enough left to play his part in the civilization of the future. He had, I noticed, square and sturdy little fists, and he may be some day one of the many who will fight for England, when England's guests defend the door so generously opened to shelter them. The Atom insisted upon sharing the cradle; why not? It had discovered the cradle in the first place and had a certain right to it. So it curled up in a corner, and Jean gurgled and grew fat and rosy in its companionship. It was a joy to have a real baby in the house while the birds were building, and the spring flowers budding, and the young ferns uncurling in the forest.

The father of the family was a farmer whose house and barns had been wiped out of existence within ten minutes one cruel winter day. Mine host has found a place for him; another man is needed on one of the farms belonging to the estate; a small house there was vacant, and thither they have moved, bag and baggage, baby and baby's cradle. They wanted the Atom, but the Atom and I have lived through such hard days together, cheek to cheek, that I could not let it go. The new house is not far, quite within Puck distance, and Don and I make frequent calls.

May 30. May, with its young leaves, its radiance of blossoming fruit trees, its spring greenness,--never have I known such green,--lingers yet, with its sweet spring chill and its ripple of slow English streams among the grasses. Such a world of beauty, and a world of sorrow! Petals of apple blossom drift even through the open doorway, and everywhere is the murmur of the little wind among the leaves. I sit in my garden, under my apple trees, or walk where the sunshine filters down, clear and still, through the lime trees in the lane, thinking of many things. Close by the stream, at my garden's edge, grow palest purple irises, and at times they seem spirit lilies, delicate as light, growing beside you in your far place.

A few days ago Don dug one of your books out of the case,--he loves to touch them with his faithful paw. It was Dante's _Paradiso_ and as it fell open I saw that you had marked certain words with my name: "dolce guida e cara," "sweet guide and dear." That was too beautiful a thing to say of a mere mortal woman.

I find myself thinking consciously less about you as the days go on; a touch in the darkness, a gleam across the stars, a whisper by the river,--so you come back to me; but the different things we said and did do not return with quite such sharp distinctness and sharp pain. Yet I exist more and more in you, living your life and mine too, spirit to spirit.

Loneliness seems forever impossible since you went out and left the gate ajar, and all the world came in, and all its sorrows. The griefs that enter, in some strange way solace my own, and this increasing sense of the anguish of the world is lightened and lifted by sharing it with other folk. It is good to feel so passionately and so utterly a part of all that lives and throbs and suffers. Though the life that goes on in the little red house must inevitably lack something of the human warmth and joy that we should have known together, more life and greater enters, I think, than would have been ours if our old dream of happiness had come true. One can bear whatever happens, so long as it makes one understand.

I started out in loneliness to tell my story, to you and to myself, for comfort in the long silences, and lo! I have no story; I do not seem to be merely I; I have gone out of myself and cannot find my way back. In this relieving greatness is, perhaps, dim foreknowledge of what is to come. I have nothing left to ask of life, no demands to make: a little service, work, and sleep,--and then?

June 15. Peter, can it be Peter, with that expression upon his face? He is really here, and a transfiguring look of suffering has worn away forever a something of earth and of stubbornness,--a Peter who seems to have gained greatly in strength and in stature, although one arm is gone, and an empty sleeve hangs by his side. If I had known how to salute I should have saluted Peter when I saw him home from the war; mentally I do it whenever I see him working with his one poor hand in my garden beds. One of the first things he said to me when he came home was that he was going to Shepperton to try to get work that a one-armed man could do, selling papers or something of the kind. But Peter, who has faced the enemy and the poisonous gases, flinched before my countenance when I heard this. Peter knows now that the little red house and the garden can never get on without him.