III
From all these classes, whether rich or poor, is drawn a companionship of the bereaved. It is from them that the new Spiritualism expects a multitude of recruits, for their eyes are looking towards the shadows. Sunday morning in greater London was once “a time for tending little gardens,” but the boy who used to “help father” with his spade and pail may be resting now in a hero’s grave by Somme or Tigris. Perhaps he has no sleeping-place, even among the undistinguished dead. His body may have been utterly obliterated, his end may be a subject for mysterious surmise. If the Churches cannot speak to the mourners words of Divine consolation, Spiritualism will rush in with its false and fatal comfort. Shallow writers have told us in recent months that “the dead are sleeping in their graves, already half-forgotten.” So it seems, because life’s routine proceeds as usual in homes where “one is not.” If Mr. George Haw’s description of the day of rest in outer London could be brought up to date, we should doubtless hear of nap and newspaper, country walk and evening concert, with a cigar as the breadwinner’s treat in the after-dinner hour. But the clay cottage of materialism has begun to rock and crumble. Every incident of the war is marked and dated according to its bearing on the personal sorrow. Nor is it surprising that ignorant persons should brush aside contemptuously vague warnings as to the peril of dabbling in Spiritualism. There is no more superstitious peasantry in the world than that of Brittany, nor any with a darker array of ghostly legends. Yet we are told that on St. John’s Eve, when the bonfire is lit and the priests and choir have gone past in long procession with banners and relics, places are set beside the glowing embers for those whose bodies are in the churchyard, that they, too, may look in at the dancers. In every land which war has visited arms are stretched out towards the young and beautiful who have fallen, and the cry is heard from mourners’ lips, “I am determined to take the hazard of the night along with you.”