Chapter I

Michael Fairless was an artist, with the artist’s longing for creative expression. But while she was able to move about among her fellows her imaginative force, together with such strength of body as she had and her fine intellectual endowment, was spent on their behalf. She gave herself without stint and, it appeared, without regret for much that must consequently stand aside. Men and their miseries, their poverty, pleasures, joys and pain, seemed to take the place for her of the artist’s material in language or clay or colour. The material she chose was life, life in all its crudity or evasiveness, its stubborn resistance, forbidding weakness, its failures and faults; and with the far-reaching promise upon which only faith as strong as hers can keep a constant hold. In each man she saw, through disfigurement and disguise, his proper reflexion of the divine image, as a sculptor sees in the block of marble the one beauty that he is to set free.

There were times when I thought this passion of hers would always be enough. I thought the fountain of charity in her heart would never allow her artistic longings to be carried into any field but that of life. When the claims of human needs and suffering for the moment slackened, I saw that there was always the attraction of a perennial love and carefulness for every creature of the earth, even the very lowest. From the blade of grass and the clod on which it grew, to every beast and bird, all things entered her soul to become her own, to become centres of the active, self-devoted interest that one gives only to one’s own. I might well think that she would live and die without any disturbing recognition of another longing unfulfilled. Moreover, her enjoyment of the creative work of others was never tainted by self-pity, or by that base alloy of envy which kills delight in many of us, whose gifts and executive powers are far inferior to hers. It seemed reasonable to think that her love of beauty would be satisfied with what her indomitable eagerness and energy enabled her to absorb from literature, painting and sculpture, from music and, above all, from the symbolism of religion in its poetry of psalm and stately hymn, and in those lovely myths with which the childlike heart of man has clothed his intuitions of divine things. But I was wrong. The impulse to create, though often overborne, was very masterful.

Out of that impulse sprang the crucifix now in St John Baptist’s church in London (Pimlico Road). In this she shewed a promise of what might have been had she been trained and practised in a plastic art. But I am sure, nevertheless, that nothing short of inability to go out into the highways of life, to seek and find, or at the least to be sought and found by, troubled men and women, would have turned her finally to any engrossing work other than that which she could do for them.

Twenty months before she died the opportunity came—as mortal sickness. To most of us it would hardly have been an opportunity. Among our writers only a few unconquerable spirits, of whom Robert Louis Stevenson perhaps is chief, have been able to overcome flesh and its hindrances by the governance of the soul, when the weight of Death’s heavy hand has been laid upon them. For men of this rank, life, when it meets new difficulty in a body nearing to the grave, rises against that difficulty in a fresh uplifting of power. The men themselves are carried beyond the atmosphere of oppression caused by the disabilities of mortal sickness; and we watch them working miracles, as though these were trifles light as air. Of that rare company was Michael Fairless. But she knew when and how she was beaten; for there is another thing to be noted of that company—an illuminated common sense. They work miracles, it is true; but they are not often found trying impossibilities. Their faith is potent, but it is neither superstitious nor absurd. Behind what looks to many of us a reckless venture and a foolish hope it seems that there is, in reality, something which takes the place of a prudent man’s prudent calculation. It seems that where other men must calculate they _see_—yet without knowing that they see. They know what they can and what they cannot do; but it is as though by a concealed interior vision, not by mere guess, that they make discoveries. Their decisions are, for the most part, not to be justified by the maxims and habits of ordinary usage in life, yet are very often crowned with good success and are richly productive as ordinary ways are not. They have, as I said, their common sense.

So, when Michael Fairless met defeat, she laid down her arms, the wonted weapons of her charity, but took up others. And with these she made a way, not only to hearts beyond any range of hers before, but also for her artist-soul, frustrate in the years gone by. We who looked on thought that but for the help she could give to friends able to come to her bedside, most likely she would do nothing more. Again we were wrong.

We took her away from London to the Down country that she loved, hoping for some recovery—against hope and against her own conviction. There, in her ‘cool light room on the garden level’ with windows opening to the ground, day after day she looked ‘across the bright grass—_il verde smalto_—’ and beyond ‘the promise of coming lilies,’ to the Gate of her symbolic fancy:—‘I know now,’ she says in “The Roadmender,” ‘that whenever and wherever I die my soul will pass out through this white gate.’

There, beside the gate, the roadmender was born. I suppose he was fully grown in the spirit of her meditation before she spoke of him. Certainly it was her own soul, mind, heart, and life’s experience that he embodied. He was conceived of her, bone of her bone, spirit of her spirit. Who knows him knows her; in following his life and death we follow hers. His realized ideal is hers that was unrealized. But indeed in him she touched realization. ‘I am a roadmender,’ she said to me, ‘there, by the white gate.’ As in all true artists, life passed from her into her creation, virtue went forth from her, and she with virtue: she _was_ that roadmender.

I think she would have been content with giving him life thus, within her own artistic cognizance, but for another thing. She wanted to earn money, little or much; had a hundred uses for it; saw that perhaps some would come into her hands this way. So she demanded of me pencil and paper, and wrote down (with her left hand, the right being disabled; and without being lifted up in bed) the first chapter of ‘The Roadmender.’ She wrote easily, it appeared, and as well and clearly, almost as quickly, as before this last disabling sickness. She hardly ever paused for thought or word, and made small correction. To the best of my present memory the second chapter was written next day and with the same swift facility.

Neither of these, nor any that followed, was thought of by her (or for that matter by me) as a chapter; each was no more than a sketch, a little paper telling of the roadmender she was. Not until much later, in fact just before the end, did it occur to either of us that she had been writing a book.

We sent those sketches, the first and second, to Mr Lathbury, the editor of _The Pilot_, who accepted them with encouraging, and to her surprising, readiness. They were published; and from that time to this their readers, in a fast increasing number, have asked for news, facts, about the writer. Unquestionably The Roadmender’s appeal, whatever it was, went home there and then and has never ceased to find response. But this is not the place in which that appeal should be discussed; it shall be dealt with later. Here I only allude to it in passing, as a significant piece of the short history of an all too short literary life.

For anyone who knew the previous life of the author, the fitness of her roadmender to present herself and her ideals was obvious. ‘After all,’ he says for her in that opening chapter, ‘what do we ask of life, here or indeed hereafter, but leave to serve, to live, to commune with our fellow-men and with ourselves; and from the lap of earth to look up into the face of God?’ That aspiration to service and communion had been in her no affair of mere aspiration; it had been a burning force, not a quietistic scheme. Yet always her heart and soul rested gladly in ‘the lap of earth’; and she turned her face towards the face of God as she discerned that vision everywhere, in earth and earth’s little ones, and in the face of man. But a new peacefulness came with the laying down of arms, and she could picture herself quietly at work on the common road, serving ‘the footsteps of her fellows’; indeed joining with contentment ‘the company of weary old men who sit on the sunny side of the workhouse wall and wait for the tender mercies of God.’

Death it is that in truth she waits for in the pages of ‘The Roadmender.’ You will find death everywhere, a friend, a ‘strong angel’ and, as here, ‘the tender mercies of God.’ The road, too, although the common road of service and of the common labour of man, is the one that leads into the great silence; the mysteries of God and man cast shadows in the sunshine of its ‘white highway.’ This is the background, or the chorus if you will, even of the first part of the book, where she is giving a picture of the man and herself, and furnishing his experience from her own experience in past days. There is the snake, bringing in Melampus and the revealing of secrets by the fatal kiss; there is the old widow, waiting, as she herself was waiting, for death and a ‘“kind” burial’ in ‘the little churchyard which has been a cornfield, and may some day be one again.’ The sea brings memories of ‘its secret dead in the caverns of Peace,’ and of ‘the still and silent Sea of Glass’ and ‘the Voice as the voice of many waters.’ But withal there is love, the constant love of earth’s fair face, and its living adornment; the love for which she thanks God as ‘the Brotherhood of the Poor’; even the bitter-sweet love of death itself:—‘Very pleasant art thou, O Brother Death, thy love is wonderful, passing the love of women.’

‘“Surely all men should be roadmenders,”’ the parson says. ‘O wise parson, so to read the lesson of the road!’ That is her heart-felt comment.

The first part of the book ended with the ending of autumn, when we brought her back to London—to our house, 91 Cheyne Walk. She was borne to the station on a mattress laid in the bottom of a covered cart, the tilt thrown open at the back. As the cart went on, she watched through this opening, the receding lane—‘lay as in a blissful dream,’ she says. ‘The looped-back tarpaulin framed the long vista of my road with the downs beyond; and I lay in the cool dark, caressed by the fresh breeze in its thoroughfare, soothed by the strong monotonous tramp of the great grey team and the music of the jangling harness.’ ‘It is like Life,’ she goes on, ‘this travelling backwards—that which has been, alone visible—like Life, which is, after all, retrospective with a steady moving on into the Unknown, Unseen, until Faith is lost in Sight and experience is no longer the touchstone of humanity.’

I believe she thought, then, that she would never come back to her road, to the green fields she loved so well, the garden that was ‘an epitome of peace,’ the sycamore-tree that made a microcosmic world for her as she lay beneath it, caressed by the sunlight scattered through its leaves. She thought, I believe, that Brother Death would meet her among the close-set houses of the town, while she lay isolated in the great city. So she said farewell, not only with the roadmender to roadmending, but to the country of her love. Yet she says it with a characteristic qualifying:—‘It is scarcely a farewell, for my road is ubiquitous, eternal; there are green ways in Paradise and golden streets in the beautiful City of God. Nevertheless, my heart is heavy; for, viewed by the light of the waning year, roadmending seems a great and wonderful work which I have poorly conceived of and meanly performed: yet I have learnt to understand dimly the truth of three great paradoxes—the blessing of a curse, the voice of silence, the companionship of solitude—and so take my leave of this stretch of road, and of you who have fared along the white highway through the medium of a printed page.

‘Farewell! It is a roadmender’s word; I cry you Godspeed to the next milestone—and beyond.’ In her mind, I am sure, these words were the last she was to write.