Then I spoke of the charm of the town work that Leonard had been called to take up once again. I tried to paint it as he dreamed of it the crowds, the classes, the fog, the scent of the streets. Then I went higher to the Easter scene, the shore in the morning, the vision of the altar that dawns on a true man's work however deep the night of his failure may have been, wheresoever in all the world he is working.
Leonard looked gratefully at me as I came down the pulpit steps.
While we hurried along from the Service on our way to the station (Reeve was coming to see me off), I quoted some words to him. We were just passing that fish-shop.
'Awake, O north wind, and come, thou south; blow upon my garden that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden.'
His eyes kindled. 'Yes, old man,' he said; 'I've come into my garden. How I used to dream of this sort of reek out in Africa!'
I felt a gross materialist as I hurried home to my roses and red-thorn, leaving him to that visionary garden and those mystical spices.
THE PLACE OF PILGRIMAGE
I.
'When you have set Thought free for one particular end you cannot bind her again as you will.' Such is the purport of a certain historian's dictum, and I have proved the truth of what he says. Edgar used to go to the Place of Pilgrimage long ago in his holidays, but I used not to go with him. I did not sympathize with his veneration overmuch in those times of long ago. But I respected the desire for hero-worship, and helped him thither each year that he wanted to visit his shrine. He used to come up for his long holidays every year from the colony. I had known his father rather well, and he had not any settled home. His mother was dead, as well as his father. No one now that knew him need know what she was like, for he took after his father almost unmitigatedly. His father was blonde and aggressively Saxon in appearance. His mother had been Dutch, semi-Dutch, of the colored Dutch type, as I very well knew. She came from the Western province, and died when he was but a year old, to be followed by his father some ten years later, just when he had come back to South Africa from England. Then I, acting on my own responsibility, sent him to school in the Eastern Province. No one seemed to bother, even if they had any inkling of his mother's parentage; he looked to be so completely his father's son.
It was in Edgar's schooldays that the Place of Pilgrimage was inaugurated, and that a big star of hope swam into his ken. I had told him about Oxford before, but there had then seemed no sort of path open for him to go up thither. Now, in the midst of his schooldays, there opened out to him a path that he thought he might climb. It was then in the next long holiday time that he took his path, a curious and grateful pilgrim, to the Matopos, to explore the shrine and to give thanks before it.