Chapter III

Spring came, and in May she bade her last farewell to London. With infinite difficulty, and at the cost of an unforeseen agony of pain, we took her once more into the country, where she could see the white gate again from her garden room, and sometimes, on good days—more rarely than we hoped—be carried out to lie ‘on a green carpet, powdered yellow and white with the sun’s own flowers; overhead a great sycamore where the bees toil and sing; and sighing shimmering poplars golden grey against the blue.’ There, at the White Gate, she wrote the last chapters of ‘The Roadmender,’ beginning, if I remember well, in June.

‘A great joy has come to me’; she says, in the first of those papers, ‘one of those unexpected gifts which life loves to bestow after we have learnt to loose our grip of her. I am back in my own place very near my road—the white gate lies within my distant vision; near the lean grey Downs which keep watch and ward between the country and the sea; very near, nay, in the lap of Mother Earth.’... ‘The day of Persephone has dawned for me, and I, set free like Demeter’s child, gladden my eyes with this foretaste of coming radiance, and rest my tired sense with the scent and sound of home. Away down the meadow I hear the early scythe song, and the warm air is fragrant with the fallen grass. It has its own message for me as I lie here, I who have obtained yet one more mercy, and the burden of it is life, not death.’

Then the roadmender must be himself again and go a-haymaking in another reminiscence, one that tells her a secret of the ‘rain upon the mown grass’ and the ‘failure’ of the fallen swathes. “_My ways are not your ways, saith the Lord._” ‘I remember how I went home along the damp sweet-scented lanes through the grey mist of the rain, thinking of the mown field and Elizabeth Banks [a sinner blessed through her very sin], and many, many more; and that night, when the sky had cleared and the nightingale sang, I looked out at the moon riding at anchor, a silver boat in a still blue sea ablaze with the headlights of the stars, and the saying of the herdsman of Tekoa came to me—as it has come oftentimes since:—

‘“Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night; that calleth for the waters of the sea and poureth them out upon the face of earth; the Lord is His name.”’

She was within a very little of the end, we thought, even then while it was still possible to carry her into the garden and lay her in the shelter of her tree, where, the last time but one that she was out, she wrote the second paper of this part. She thought so herself, as her meditation shews. ‘I feel not so much desire for the beauty to come,’ she says, ‘as a great longing to open my eyes a little wider during the time which remains to me in this beautiful world of God’s making, where each moment tells its own tale of active, progressive life in which there is no undoing. Nature knows naught of the web of Penelope, that acme of anxious pathetic waiting, but goes steadily on in ever widening circle towards the fulfilment of the mystery of God.

‘There are, I take it, two master keys to the secrets of the universe, viewed _sub specie æternitatis_, the Incarnation of God, and the Personality of Man; with these it is true for us as for the pantheistic little man of contemptible speech, that “all things are ours,” yea, even unto the third heaven.

‘I have lost my voracious appetite for books;’ she goes on, ‘their language is less plain than scent and song and the wind in the trees; and for me the clue to the next world lies in the wisdom of earth rather than in the learning of men. “_Libera me ab fuscina Hophni_,” prayed the good Bishop, fearful of religious greed. I know too much, not too little; it is realisation that I lack, wherefore I desire these last days to confirm in myself the sustaining goodness of God, the love which is our continuing city, the New Jerusalem whose length, breadth, and height are all one.’

The cares of this world, such as they were for her, and the most part of them were other people’s, had slipped away:—‘It is a time,’ she says, ‘of exceeding peace. There is a place waiting for me under the firs in the quiet churchyard; thanks to my poverty I have no worldly anxieties or personal dispositions; and I am rich in friends, many of them unknown to me, who lavishly supply my needs and make it ideal to live on the charity of one’s fellow-men. I am most gladly in debt to all the world: and to Earth, my mother’—she writes, as though having suddenly turned her eyes to the loveliness around—‘for her great beauty.’ Then, with a backward reflexion on the long history of the human spirit in its groping after the divine, she exclaims:—‘There is more truth in the believing cry, “Come from thy white cliffs, O Pan!” than in the religion that measures a man’s life by the letter of the Ten Commandments, and erects itself as judge and ruler over him, instead of throwing open the gate of the garden where God walks with man from morning until morning.’

The end of that paper is a breath of her heart’s longing for rest:—‘As I write the sun is setting; in the pale radiance of the sky above his glory there dawns the evening star; and earth, like a tired child, turns her face to the bosom of the night.’

Once more she wrote from beneath the tree on one of the last days of June:—‘The poplar has lost its metallic shimmer, the chestnut its tall white candles; and the sound of the wind in the fully-leaved branches is like the sighing of the sea.’ Summer was coming to fullness; yet she lingered still. The eyes of her soul sought day by day a land whose boundaries begin where those of this world end:—‘Looking across at the white gate I wonder concerning the quiet pastures and still waters that lie beyond, even as Brother Ambrose wondered long years ago in the monastery by the forest.’ She asked for the manuscript of her little book, ‘Hilarius,’ not thinking that it would ever see light in print; and copied what she had written there of the vision of Brother Ambrose, monk and painter. In ‘a still night of many stars’ he saw, ‘from a great and high mountain,’ a radiant path in the heavens, and between the stars, as they ‘gathered themselves together on either side until they stood as walls of light,’ he beheld ‘the Holy City with roof and pinnacle aflame, and walls aglow with such colours as no earthly limner dreams of, and much gold;’ until to his great grief, ‘a little grey cloud came out of the north and hid the city from his sight.’

The end of that vision is an expression on her part of the perennial, universal sorrow of the artist of every kind. ‘Brother Ambrose fell sick because of the exceeding great longing he had to limn the Holy City, and was very sad; but the Prior bade him thank God, and remember the infirmity of the flesh, which, like the little grey cloud, veiled Jerusalem to his sight.’

Just as she was writing these words the monastery bell of St Hugh rang out, and another, yet harmonious, note sounded in the many-stringed instrument of her soul:—

‘They still have time for visions behind those guarding walls,’ she says, ‘but for most of us it is not so. We let slip the ideal for what we call the real, and the golden dreams vanish while we clutch at phantoms: we speed along life’s pathway, counting to the full the sixty minutes of every hour, yet the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong.... And yet, looking back to the working days, I know how much goodness and loving kindness there is under the froth and foam. If we do not know ourselves we most certainly do not know our brethren: that revelation awaits us, it may be, first in Heaven. To have faith is to create; to have hope is to call down blessing, to have love is to work miracles.’

Then, back to the mystic’s and the artist’s wide-eyed longing:—‘Above all let us see visions, visions of colour and light, of green fields and broad rivers, of palaces laid with fair colours, and gardens where a place is found for rosemary and rue.’

The dominant note in Michael Fairless’s religion was mystical, as any man may see; and she had the large freedom of judgement, the understanding of and patience with sin, imperfection, failure, that are given only by the insight of the heart.

It is true, no doubt, that in every religious man an acute realization of one of the three great elements in religion—the mystical, the intellectual, and the institutional—naturally carries with it some degree of subordination of the rest. The mystic is apt to undervalue reflective thought; for his soul opens to him avenues of vision, which are but poorly represented by the attempts of theologians to formulate the poetic utterances of the prophets and the symbolic pictures of saints. He is apt, also, to think too little of the outward sign, however effectual it may be, simply because, in an intimate awareness of his soul, the spiritual grace sweeps it aside. He may forget, in his wordless communion with God, the need there is for utterance—for the language of rite or word or ceremonial gesture—if men of different intellectual and spiritual ranks or stages in development are to bear each his proper part in a common religious life, and to make clear, even to themselves, the depth and height and breadth of their emptiness without God. Even those among us not justly to be called mystics, in an eminent or distinguishing sense, rarely attain anything near an equal balance between what they apprehend by intellect—by reasoning—and what the institution gives them, as it were, ready made; very many so hold the scales as to let the religion of the heart—of experience of the real, which is all men’s mysticism—be outweighed by one or other of those two, perhaps by each. In Michael Fairless heart knowledge and worship, the spirit’s admiration and pursuit, ruled all the rest. But from the character of this pursuit and worship in her, from its intensity and inclusiveness, sprang her high appreciation and glad sharing of the rest. The love of the brethren, of all brethren, of all that lives, was as the breath of her own soul’s life. She knew, by her hold upon the inner truth for spirit of a material world, the significance for spiritual growth awaiting every man in the least of little things. These material things, small or great, were hers, of her flesh and of her spirit; she could no more give them up, set them aside from her religion, than she could give up God or man. Therefore she sought, as the temple of her worship, a place where there should be room for all; not only for angels and archangels, saints and prophets, but for the sinful and the foolish among men, and for the common things of earth close by and the far-away revealing of the stars. In her Church—by implication at least and promise—all the worlds of life and death, of the spirit and the flesh, should be embraced and held together. Pan on his white cliffs—‘we can never be too Pagan,’ she says, ‘if we are truly Christian’—the ancient Mysteries, Jewish sacrifice, the ancient world-wide myths—those ‘eternal truths held fast in the Church’s net’—for all these and more there must be hands held out in a temple of the God whose witness was everywhere and in all, whose Spirit fills not only the whole round world but the spaces of the spheres.

By implication and promise, in principle you may say if not in practice, she found what she sought in the English Church; although like the rest of us she had to carry promise forward, by hope and faith, to a fulfilment she could not look for now. But she found sacraments now, bringing to her more than promise. These, in her institutional life, she must have—she for whom all life was sacramental—and especially the greatest, ‘the most social sacrament,’ she called it. There in the Church they were for every one of us, as she demanded them; with a meaning plain to be read by men obliged to run; calling aloud upon the ignorant and the blind; showing beacon-lights for those who wandered from the way. There earth and heaven met and the sinner and the saint; there the life of man was taken up into the life and manhood and love of God. The universe was focussed there; and there she worshipped in peace, as one at home.

You see how by disinterestedness she escaped the fate of mystics who lack that sovran antiseptic against self-corruption. You see, too, how it was that she never ceased to value—some might say to over-value—the institutional element in religion. But she was far from thinking that she had discovered, or ever would discover, a Church as it ought to be. She knew too well what the very promise of catholicity entails of past and present and long-lasting imperfection. She could not help but know and see that an _ecclesia_, a gathering in which all nations and generations should be embraced, and which needed from every man the gifts of the divine spirit that were his, must be marred for want of them. Here was a noble but ill-shapen body composed of ill-shapen members whose number reached back into the dim ages of the life of man, and would stretch into the yet dimmer ages of his life to come—a slowly organizing body, shaping itself and being shapen always anew, suffering, wounded, bearing the marks of scars and of disease that had eaten into its flesh. How could it be anything but as and what it was, even though its Head were the eternal Christ himself, the Humanity of God sharing that scarred and injured flesh? She knew something of what all this implies of beauty and truth to come slowly, very slowly; she saw something of what sin and folly, ignorance and weakness bring to every work and all the assemblies of mankind. Seeing clearly and confessing that in the greatest religious experiment ever tried upon this earth these things must be reckoned with, must qualify judgement, set a pause upon both complacency and too ready condemnation, she was content, nay happy, to remain where promise opens out an endless way. Can any one of us do more or better?

So much for her attitude towards the institution of the Christian Church. With regard to the intellectual element in religion—especially the schematic and scientific interpretation which we call theology—she was wholly without fear. She had neither leisure nor taste nor scholarship for historical or documentary criticism, but when the results of criticism came her way she was, as always, eager to learn. Serious work of this kind, she was sure, could do the cause of religion nothing but good. Theological interpretation must, of course, emphatically and above all things make sense when face to face with the saints and prophets; an interpretation that did not must go. But it must also make sense in face of better knowledge, whether of history, of science, or of philosophy. Her mind was as hospitable as her heart; and with a delicate and rational discrimination, a power of sifting and rejection, that over and over again served her well in her adventurous career of thought. You wrote in marble, not in sand, when you corrected her mistakes; or rather you wrote as though with some fluent leaven that ran through all the living stuff of her. You found its traces everywhere long after, and learnt to wonder why such vital receptivity was so rare. She sought truth and ensued it. Moreover, her sense of the height and depth of mystery in man’s life and experience precluded for her the easy satisfaction of those superficial dogmatists who ‘need no repentance.’ ‘The universe,’ she writes, ‘is full of miracle and mystery: the darkness and silence are set for a sign we dare not despise.’ She was among those for whom that sign is sacramental, conveying that which it declares, bearing with it the ineffable promise embraced for men within the darknesses and silences of God. These, for the mystic, are no barrier, but rather the ocean where his love finds the immense waters of the love of God. ‘A sign,’ she says, ‘that we dare not despise’—one that tells us to set our hand before our lips, lest we blaspheme God with our little self-made rules for him. The one rule to which she clung was the rule of Love and Faith and Hope, the all-sufficing rule of men who feel the stir of the mighty winds of that spirit which blows where it listeth and cannot be stilled.

Summer was going fast when the last scene of her long act of death opened. In the early days of August she grew much worse; after the third she was unable to take any food—only a few drops of water now and then. On the twelfth she told me she must try to keep a promise she had made to Mr Lathbury that she would write something more for him if she could. By this time she was almost blind, and speech was very difficult and painful to her. In spite of this she succeeded in dictating to me, after nine days of starvation and months of wasting, the last chapter of ‘The Roadmender.’ It was a deed of heroism.

Her mind travelled from the sound of rain after drought, outside her window, and the roused and eager business of the little birds she loved, back to the panorama of past years. She revived her childhood—‘the scent of the first cowslip field under the warm side of the hedge’ where she sang to herself ‘for pure joy of their colour and fragrance’; bluebells ‘like the backwash of a southern sea’; Watcombe Down—‘a stretch of golden gorse and new-turned blood-red field, the green of the headland, and beyond, the sapphire sea.’ Fragrance, music, above all colour—these surged from out her distant memories. And as the roll unfolded and later years revived, it was still the same. Germany, ‘the warm-scented breath of the pines,’ ‘the tiny shifting lamps’ of glow-worms ‘pale yellow, purely white, green as the underside of a northern wave,’ and in Switzerland a solitary blue gentian—her first—‘what need of another, for finding one I had gazed into the mystery of all.’

Then the past slipped away, giving place to ‘the uneventful road’ on which she was travelling now. ‘Each day questions me as it passes; each day makes answer for me “not yet.”’

‘Do I travel alone,’ she asks, with a glance at the passage in the Odyssey, ‘or am I one of a great company?’ The voices of Penelope’s suitors send her to the chorus of the voices of earth, the language of worship that ‘lies very nigh’ to man:—‘What better note can our frail tongues lisp than the voice of wind and sea, river and stream,’ those grateful servants giving all and asking nothing, the soft whisper of snow and rain eager to replenish, or the thunder proclaiming a majesty too great for utterance? ‘Here, too, stands the angel with the censer gathering up the fragrance of teeming earth and forest-tree, of flower and fruit, and sweetly pungent herb distilled by sun and rain for joyful use. Here, too, come acolytes lighting the dark with tapers—sun, moon, and stars—gifts of the Lord that His sanctuary may stand ever served.’

She comes back to the earth, this child of earth, bearing sheaves of the harvest of heaven. For her there was no gulf set between these two—was not the Incarnation of God one of her ‘master-keys’? Heaven and earth were joined in one for her by the life and love that men might share, in which all things are made one. When, at the very last, earth fills her memory and mind with its scent and colours and sound, it is an earth transmuted and transparent. And beyond earth and even heaven is greater marvel still, that which she never forgot—the mystery of the darkness and silence of God, ‘the silence greater than speech, darkness greater than light.’ So, this memory dominating all, she says her last farewell.

We think, or may well think, of Rabindra Nath Tagore:—

‘I have got my leave. Bid me farewell, my brothers. I bow to you all and take my departure.

‘Here I give back the keys of my door—and I give up all claims to my house. I only ask for last kind words from you.

‘We were neighbours for long, but I received more than I could give. Now the day has dawned and the lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A summons has come and I am ready for my journey.’