Tatterdemalion Part 14

Poirot, _au contraire_, was morose the whole evening, and awoke next morning exactly the same as usual. In such different ways does the gift of the G.o.ds affect us.

They had their habits, so diverse, their const.i.tutions, and their dreams--alas! not yet realised. I know not where they may be now; Bidan-Prosper cannot yet be cooking at the Ritz in London town; but "_grand-pere_" Poirot may perchance be distributing again his vegetables in the streets of Nancy, driving his two good little horses--_des gaillards_--with the reins hooked round "_l'empereur_." Good friends--good luck!

XIII

THE m.u.f.fLED s.h.i.+P

It was cold and grey, but the band on sh.o.r.e was playing, and the flags on sh.o.r.e were fluttering, and the long double-tiered wharf crowded with welcomers in each of its open gaps, when our great s.h.i.+p slowly drew alongside, packed with cheering, chattering crowds of khaki figures, letting go all the pent-up excitement of getting home from the war. The air was full of songs and laughter, of cheers, and shouted questions, the hooting of the launches' sirens, the fluttering flags and hands and handkerchiefs; and there were faces of old women, and of girls, intent, expectant, and the white gulls were floating against the grey sky, when our s.h.i.+p, listed slightly by those thousands of figures straining towards the land which had bred them, gently slurred up against the high wharf, and was made fast.

The landing went on till night had long fallen, and the band was gone.

At last the chatter, the words of command, the s.n.a.t.c.hes of song, and that most favourite chorus: "Me! and my girl!" died away, and the wharf was silent and the s.h.i.+p silent, and a wonderful clear dark beauty usurped the s.p.a.ces of the sky. By the light of the stars and a half moon the far harbour sh.o.r.es were just visible, the huddled buildings on the near sh.o.r.e, the spiring masts and feathery appanage of ropes on the moored s.h.i.+p, and one blood-red light above the black water. The night had all that breathless beauty which steeps the soul in a quivering, quiet rapture....

Then it was that clearly, as if I had been a welcomer standing on land in one of the wharf gaps, I saw her come--slow, slow, creeping up the narrow channel, in beside the wharf, a great grey silent s.h.i.+p. At first I thought her utterly empty, deserted, possessed only by the thick coiled cables forward, the huge rusty anchors, the piled-up machinery of structure and funnel and mast, weird in the blue darkness. A lantern on the wharf cast a bobbing golden gleam deep into the oily water at her side. Gun-grey, perfectly mute, she ceased to move, coming to rest against the wharf. And then, with a s.h.i.+ver, I saw that something clung round her, a grey film or emanation, which s.h.i.+fted and hovered, like the invisible wings of birds in a thick mist. Gradually to my straining eyes that filmy emanation granulated, and became faces attached to grey filmy forms, thousands on thousands, and every face bent towards the sh.o.r.e, staring, as it seemed, through me, at all that was behind me. Slowly, very slowly, I made them out--faces of helmeted soldiers, bulky with the gear of battle, their arms outstretched, and the lips of every one opened, so that I expected to hear the sound of cheering; but no sound came. Now I could see their eyes. They seemed to beseech--like the eyes of a little eager boy who asks his mother something she cannot tell him; and their outstretched hands seemed trying to reach her, lovingly, desperately trying to reach her! And those opened lips, how terribly they seemed trying to speak! "Mother! Mother Canada!" As if I had heard, I knew they were saying--those opened lips which could speak no more!

"Mother! Mother Canada! Home! Home!..."

And then away down the wharf some one chanted: "Me and my girl!" And, silent as she had come, the m.u.f.fled s.h.i.+p vanished in all her length, with those grey forms and those mute faces; and I was standing again in the bows beside a huge hawser; below me the golden gleam bobbing deep in the oily water, and above me the cold start in beauty s.h.i.+ning.

XIV

HERITAGE

(AN IMPRESSION)

From that garden seat one could see the old low house of pinkish brick, with a path of queer-shaped flagstones running its length, and the tall grey chapel from which came the humming and chanting and organ drone of the Confirmation Service. But for that, and the voices of two gardeners working below us among the fruits and flowers, the July hush was complete. And suddenly one became aware of being watched.

That thin white windmill on the hill!

Away past the house, perhaps six hundred yards, it stood, ghostly, with a face like that of a dark-eyed white owl, made by the crossing of its narrow sails. With a black companion--a yew-tree cut to pyramid form, on the central point of Suss.e.x--it was watching us, for though one must presume it built of old time by man, it looked up there against the sky, with its owl's face and its cross, like a Christo-Pagan presence.

What exactly Paganism was we shall never know; what exactly Christianism is, we are as little likely to discover; but here and there the two principles seem to dwell together in amity. For Paganism believed in the healthy and joyful body; and Christianism in the soul superior thereto.

And, where we were sitting that summer day, was the home of bodies wrecked yet learning to be joyful, and of souls not above the process.

We moved from the grey-wood seat, and came on tiptoe to where house and chapel formed a courtyard. The doors were open, and we stood unseen, listening. From the centre of a square stone fountain a little bubble of water came up, and niched along one high wall a number of white pigeons were preening their feathers, silent, and almost motionless, as though attending to the Service.

The sheer emotion of church sounds will now and then steal away reason from the unbeliever, and take him drugged and dreaming. "Defend, O Lord, this Thy child!...." So it came out to us in the dream and drowse of summer, which the little bubble of water cooled.

In his robes--cardinal, and white, and violet--the good Bishop stood in full sunlight, speaking to the crippled and the air-raid children in their drilled rows under the shade of the doves' wall; and one felt far from this age, as if one had strayed back into that time when the builders of the old house laid slow brick on brick, wetting their whistles on mead, and knowing not tobacco.

And then, out by the chapel porch moved three forms in blue, with red neckties, and we were again in this new age, watching the faces of those listening children. The good Bishop was making them feel that he was happy in their presence, and that made them happy in his. For the great thing about life is the going-out of friendliness from being to being.

And if a place be beautiful, and friendliness ever on the peace-path there, what more can we desire? And yet--how ironical this place of healing, this beautiful "Heritage!" Verily a heritage of our modern civilisation which makes all this healing necessary! If life were the offspring of friendliness and beauty's long companions.h.i.+p, there would be no crippled children, no air-raid children, none of those good fellows in blue with red ties and maimed limbs; and the colony to which the Bishop spoke, standing grey-headed in the sun, would be dissolved.

Friendliness seems so natural, beauty so appropriate to this earth! But in this torn world they are as fugitives who nest together here and there. Yet stumbling by chance on their dove-cotes and fluttering happiness, one makes a little golden note, which does not fade off the tablet.

How entrancing it is to look at a number of faces never seen before--and how exasperating!--stamped coins of lives quite separate, quite different from every other; masks pallid, sunburned, smooth, or crumpled, to peep behind which one longs, as a lover looking for his lady at carnival, or a man aching at summer beauty which he cannot quite fathom and possess. If one had a thousand lives, and time to know and sympathy to understand the heart of every creature met with, one would want--a million! May life make us all intuitive, strip away self-consciousness, and give us suns.h.i.+ne and unknown faces!

What were they all feeling and thinking--those little cripples doing their drill on crutches; those air-raid waifs swelling their c.o.c.kney chests, rising on their toes, puffing their cheeks out in anxiety to do their best; those soldiers in their blue "slops," with a hand gone there and a leg gone here, and this and that grievous disability, all carrying on so cheerfully?

Values are queer in this world. We are accustomed to exalt those who can say "bo" to a goose; but that gift of expression which twines a halo round a lofty brow is no guarantee of goodness in the wearer. The really good are those plucky folk who plod their silent, often suffering, generally exploited ways, from birth to death, out of reach of the music of man's praise.

The first thing each child cripple makes here is a little symbolic ladder. In making it he climbs a rung on the way to his sky of self-support; and when at last he leaves this home, he steps off the top of it into the blue, and--so they say--walks there upright and undismayed, as if he had never suffered at Fate's hands. But what do he and she--for many are of the pleasant s.e.x--think of the sky when they get there; that dusty and smoke-laden sky of the industrialism which begat them? How can they breathe in it, coming from this place of flowers and fresh air, of clean bright workshops and elegant huts, which they on crutches built for themselves?

Masters of British industry, and leaders of the men and women who slave to make its wheels go round, make a pilgrimage to this spot, and learn what foul disfigurement you have brought on the land of England these last five generations! The natural loveliness in this Heritage is no greater than the loveliness that used to be in a thousand places which you have blotted out of the book of beauty, with your s.m.u.ts and wheels, your wires and welter. And to what end? To manufacture crippled children, and pale, peaky little c.o.c.kneys whose nerves are gone; (and, to be sure, the railways and motor cars which will bring you here to see them coming to life once more in sane and natural surroundings!) Blind and deaf and dumb industrialism is the accursed thing in this land and in all others.

If only we could send all our crippled soldiers to relearn life, in places such as this; if, instead of some forty or fifty, forty or fifty thousand could begin again, under the gaze of that white windmill! If they could slough off here not only those last horrors, but the dinge and drang of their upbringing in towns, where wheels go round, lights flare, streets reek, and no larks sing, save some little blinded victim in a cage. Poor William Blake:

"I will not cease from fighting, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land!"

A long vigil his sword is keeping, while the clock strikes every hour of the twenty-four. We have not yet even laid Jerusalem's foundation stone.

Ask one of those maimed soldier boys. "I like it here. Oh, yes, it's very pleasant for a change." But he hastens to tell you that he goes in to Brighton every day to his training school, as if that saved the situation; almost surprised he seems that beauty and peace and good air are not intolerable to his town-bred soul. The towns have got us--nearly all. Not until we let beauty and the quiet voice of the fields, and the scent of clover creep again into our nerves, shall we begin to build Jerusalem and learn peacefulness once more. The countryman hates strife; it breaks his dream. And life should have its covering of dream--bird's flight, bird's song, wind in the ash-trees and the corn, tall lilies glistening, the evening shadows slanting out, the night murmuring of waters. There is no other genuine dream; without it to sweeten all, life is harsh and shrill and east-wind dry, and evil overruns her more quickly than blight be-gums the rose-tree or frost blackens fern of a cold June night. We elders are past re-making England, but our children, even these crippled children here, may yet take a hand....

We left the tinies to the last--all Montessorians, and some of them little cripples, too, but with cheeks so red that they looked as if the colour must come off. They lived in a house past the white mill, across the common; and they led us by the hand down spotless corridors into white dormitories. The smile of the prettiest little maid of them all was the last thing one saw, leaving that "Heritage" of print frocks and children's faces, of flowers and nightingales, under the lee of a group of pines, the only dark beauty in the long sunlight.

XV

'A GREEN HILL FAR AWAY'

Was it indeed only last March, or in another life, that I climbed this green hill on that day of dolour, the Sunday after the last great German offensive began? A beautiful sun-warmed day it was, when the wild thyme on the southern slope smelled sweet, and the distant sea was a glitter of gold. Lying on the gra.s.s, pressing my cheek to its warmth, I tried to get solace for that new dread which seemed so cruelly unnatural after four years of war-misery.

'If only it were all over!' I said to myself; 'and I could come here, and to all the lovely places I know, without this awful contraction of the heart, and this knowledge that at every tick of my watch some human body is being mangled or destroyed. Ah, if only I could! Will there never be an end?'

And now there is an end, and I am up on this green hill once more, in December sunlight, with the distant sea a glitter of gold. And there is no cramp in my heart, no miasma clinging to my senses. Peace! It is still incredible. No more to hear with the ears of the nerves the ceaseless roll of gunfire, or see with the eyes of the nerves drowning men, gaping wounds, and death. Peace, actually Peace! The war has gone on so long that many of us have forgotten the sense of outrage and amazement we had, those first days of August, 1914, when it all began.

But I have not forgotten, nor ever shall.

In some of us--I think in many who could not voice it--the war has left chiefly this feeling: 'If only I could find a country where men cared less for all that they seem to care for, where they cared more for beauty, for nature, for being kindly to each other. If only I could find that green hill far away!' Of the songs of Theocritus, of the life of St. Francis, there is no more among the nations than there is of dew on gra.s.s in an east wind. If we ever thought otherwise, we are disillusioned now. Yet there is Peace again, and the souls of men fresh-murdered are not flying into our lungs with every breath we draw.

Each day this thought of Peace becomes more real and blessed. I can lie on this green hill and praise Creation that I am alive in a world of beauty. I can go to sleep up here with the coverlet of sunlight warm on my body, and not wake to that old dull misery. I can even dream with a light heart, for my fair dreams will not be spoiled by waking, and my bad dreams will be cured the moment I open my eyes. I can look up at that blue sky without seeing trailed across it a mirage of the long horror, a film picture of all the things that have been done by men to men. At last I can gaze up at it, limpid and blue, without a d.o.g.g.i.ng melancholy; and I can gaze down at that far gleam of sea, knowing that there is no murk of murder on it any more.

And the flight of birds, the gulls and rooks and little brown wavering things which flit out and along the edge of the chalk-pits, is once more refreshment to me, utterly untempered. A merle is singing in a bramble thicket; the dew has not yet dried off the bramble leaves. A feather of a moon floats across the sky; the distance sends forth homely murmurs; the sun warms my cheeks. And all of this is pure joy. No hawk of dread and horror keeps swooping down and bearing off the little birds of happiness. No accusing conscience starts forth and beckons me away from pleasure. Everywhere is supreme and flawless beauty. Whether one looks at this tiny snail sh.e.l.l, marvellously chased and marked, a very elf's horn whose open mouth is coloured rose; or gazes down at the flat land between here and the sea, wandering under the smile of the afternoon sunlight, seeming almost to be alive, hedgeless, with its many watching trees, and silver gulls hovering above the mushroom-coloured 'ploughs,'

and fields green in manifold hues; whether one muses on this little pink daisy born so out of time, or watches that valley of brown-rose-grey woods, under the drifting shadows of low-hanging chalky clouds--all is perfect, as only Nature can be perfect on a lovely day, when the mind of him who looks on her is at rest.

On this green hill I am nearer than I have been yet to realisation of the difference between war and peace. In our civilian lives hardly anything has been changed--we do not get more b.u.t.ter or more petrol, the garb and machinery of war still shroud us, journals still drip hate; but in our spirits there is all the difference between gradual dying and gradual recovery from sickness.

At the beginning of the war a certain artist, so one heard, shut himself away in his house and garden, taking in no newspaper, receiving no visitors, listening to no breath of the war, seeing no sight of it. So he lived, buried in his work and his flowers--I know not for how long.

Was he wise, or did he suffer even more than the rest of us who shut nothing away? Can man, indeed, shut out the very quality of his firmament, or bar himself away from the general misery of his species?

This gradual recovery of the world--this slow reopening of the great flower, Life--is beautiful to feel and see. I press my hand flat and hard down on those blades of gra.s.s, then take it away, and watch them very slowly raise themselves and shake off the bruise. So it is, and will be, with us for a long time to come. The cramp of war was deep in us, as an iron frost in the earth. Of all the countless millions who have fought and nursed and written and spoken and dug and sewn and worked in a thousand other ways to help on the business of killing, hardly any have laboured in real love of war. Ironical, indeed, that perhaps the most beautiful poem written these four years, Julian Grenfell's 'Into Battle!' was in heartfelt praise of fighting! But if one could gather the deep curses breathed by man and woman upon war since the first bugle was blown, the dirge of them could not be contained in the air which wraps this earth.