I
We sat on the churchyard wall, the Reverend and I, debating many things.
It was one of those silent, gloomy afternoons that would be cold but for their exceeding stillness. A heavy grey pall of sky lowered overhead. A multitude of noisy sparrows was going to bed in the thicket of ilex and yew, denoting that the time was nearing sunset, although not a tinge of sunset colour showed in the shrouded west. The same impulse, it seemed, had brought us both out of doors, which, elementally, was nothing more than a sudden realisation of the impossibility of remaining within. In the whole year’s round, perhaps, there come only two or three days like this. You become the prey of a conviction that something cataclysmic is going to happen. There is a sense of the world slowing down in its age-long, giddy race through the pathless ether; a feeling that its momentum is almost spent, and that any instant it may come to a final stop, to be followed by the Last Trump and dissolution of all things. The mute house seems alive about you, and full of a sort of terror and foreboding. You are seized with an apprehension that the ceilings and roof are falling in; and, hurrying forth, a like doubt comes upon you as to the stability of the sky: it looks so overburdened and unsafe. In this easeless, impotent frame of mind, I came up into the churchyard as being the most reassuring place I could think of, and found the Reverend wandering there for a like reason and in much the same mood.
‘Wind and dirty weather coming,’ said he, ‘the sort of times to make people think of home and fireside, the need for human peace on earth, and good-will towards men—the very weather for me.’
As we sat on the wall, silent awhile, the bells in far-off Stavisham began their chime, every note drifting over to us sharp and clear through the miles of torpid air.
‘Winter coming,’ he went on; ‘the winter we all need once a year to knit us closer together. Listen to Saint Barnabas practising his Christmas carillons!—forging his link in the chain of bell-ringing that in a week or two will stretch all round the world. It is my time coming, my own time. For did you ever think how little eyesight matters at Christmas? Blindness is nothing to a man then. Christmas is all glad sound; warm heart-beats; faithful words. And, please God, when the day dawns, there shall not be a cottage-nest in Windlecombe that does not overflow with these.’
To see him so deeply moved, and hear him run on presently about his many schemes of comfort and relief, the furtherance of joy and merriment, good-will and good cheer, to be sown broadcast throughout his little domain, was yourself to take the infection irresistibly. Whatever Christmas has become in the great outer world, in Windlecombe he held us year by year to all the old ideals and traditions. As I harkened to him, the black sky, the sullen, miasmic air, lost their significance. I found myself thinking only of the golden light and undimmed azure that must eternally lie beyond and above it all. And now—though I might have heard it long ago, if I had had but the heart to look up and listen—there, high against the drab heaven, a lark soared and sang.