Well, Brian tells me that going back as a blind man to the old scenes, he had a strange, thrilling sense of seeing them—seeing more clearly than before those effects of mysterious beauty, hovering with prophecy above the squalor of mud and blood, hovering and mingling as the faint light of dawn mingles, at a certain hour, with the shadows of night. People used to call his talent a "blend of vision with reality." Now, all that is left him is "vision"—vision of the spirit. But with help—I used to think it would be my help: now I realize it will be Dierdre's—who knows what extraordinary things my blind Brian may accomplish? His hope is so beautiful, and so strong, that it has lit an answering flame of hope in me.
He and I were in Ypres for a few days, just about the time I was wondering why "Jim Wyndham" didn't keep his promise to find me again. It was in Ypres, I remember, that I came across the box of "Cœurs d'Arras" I'd brought with me. Opening it, I recalled the legend about a girl who has never loved, falling in love within a month after first eating an Arras Heart. It was then I said to myself, "Why, it has come true! I have fallen in love with Jim Wyndham—and he has forgotten me!"
Oh, Padre, how that pain comes back to me now, in the midst of the new pain, like the "core of the brilliance within the brilliance!" Which hurt is worse, to love a man, and believe oneself forgotten, or to love and know one has been loved, and then become unworthy? I can't be sure. I can't even be sure that, if I could, I would go back to being the old self before I committed the one big sin of my life, which gave me Jim's father and mother, and the assurance that he had cared. For a while, after Mother Beckett told me about Jim's love for "The Girl," in spite of my wickedness I glowed with a kind of happiness. I felt that, through all the years of my life—even when I grew old—Jim would be mine, young, handsome, gay, just as I had seen him on the Wonderful Day: that I could always run away from outside things and shut the gate of the garden on myself and Jim—that rose-garden on the border of Belgium. Now, when I know—or almost know—that he will come back in the flesh to despise me, and that the gate of the garden will be forever shut—why, I shall be punished as perhaps no woman has ever been punished before. Still—still I can't be sure that I would escape, if I could, by going back to my old self!
It is writing of Belgium, and my days there with Brian while I still hoped to see Jim, that brings all these thoughts crowding so thickly to my mind, they seem to drip off my pen!
But what a different Ypres Father Beckett has now seen, and Brian felt, from that dear, pleasant Ypres into which we two drove in a cart, along a cobbled causeway as straight as a tight-drawn string! Tourists who loved the blue, and yellow, and red bath-houses on the golden beach of Ostend, didn't worry to motor over the bumpy road, through the Flemish plain to Ypres. The war was needed to bring its sad fame to "Wipers!" But Brian and I interrupted our walking tour with that cart, because we knew that the interminable causeway would take us deep into the inner quaintness of Flanders. We adored it all: and at every stopping-place on the twenty-mile road, I had the secret joy of whispering; "Perhaps it is here that He will suddenly appear, and meet us!"
There was one farmhouse on the way, where I longed to have him come. I wanted him so much that I almost created him! I was listening every moment, and through every sound, for his car. It never came. But because I so wished the place to be a background for our meeting I can see the two large living-rooms of the old house, with the black-beamed ceilings, the Flemish stoves, the tall, carved sideboards and chests with armorial bearings, the deep window-seats that were flower-stands and work-tables combined, and the shelves of ancient pottery and gleaming, antique brass. There was a comfortable fragrance of new-baked bread, mingling with the spicy scent of grass-pinks, in that house: and the hostess who gave us luncheon—a young married woman—had a mild, sweet face, strongly resembling that of St. Geneviève of Brabant, as pictured in a coloured lithograph on the wall.
St. Geneviève's story is surely the most romantic, the most pathetic of any saint who ever deigned to tread on earth!—and her life and death might serve as an allegory of Belgium's martyrdom, poor Belgium, the little country whose patron she is. Since that day at the farmhouse on the road to Ypres, I've thought often of the gentle face with its forget-me-not eyes and golden hair; and of Golo the dark persecutor who—they say now—was a real person and an ancestor of the Hohenzollerns through the first Duc de Bavière.
At Ypres, Brian painted for me a funny "imagination picture" imitating earliest Flemish work. It showed Ypres when there was no town save a few tiny houses and a triangular stronghold, with a turret at each corner, built on a little island in the river Yperlee. He named the picture "The Castle of the Three Strong Towers," and dated it in the year 900. A thousand years have passed since then. Slowly, after much fighting (the British fought as hard to take Ypres once, as they fight to save it now), the town grew great and powerful, and became the capital of Flanders. The days of the rough earthen stockades and sharp thorn-bush defences of "Our Lady of the Enclosures" passed on to the days of casemates and moats; and still on, to the days when the old fortifications could be turned into ornamental walks—days of quaintly beautiful architecture, such as Brian and I saw before the war, when we spent hours in the Grand' Place, admiring the wonderful Cloth Hall and the Spanish-looking Nieuwerck. The people of Ypres told us proudly that nothing in Bruges itself, or anywhere in Flanders, could compare with those noble buildings massed together at the west end of the Grand' Place, each stone of which represented so much wealth of the richest merchant kings of Europe.
And now, the work of those thousand busy years has crumbled in a few monstrous months, like the sand-houses of children when the tide comes in! What Father Beckett saw of Ypres after three years' bombardment, was not much more than that shown in Brian's picture, dated 900! A blackened wall or two and a heap of rubble where stood the Halle des Drapiers—pride of Ypres since the thirteenth century—its belfry, its statues, its carvings, its paintings, all vanished like the contours and colours of a sunset cloud. The cathedral is a skeleton. Hardly a pointed gable is left to tell where the quaint and prosperous houses once grouped cosily together. Ypres the town is a mourner draped in black with the stains of fire which killed its beauty and joy. But there is a glory that can never be killed, a glory above mere beauty, as a living soul is above the dead body whence it has risen. That glory is Ypres. She is a ghost, but she is an inspiration, a name of names, a jewel worth dying for—"worth giving a man's eyes for," Brian says!
"Has your brother told you about the man we met at the Visitors' Château?" asked Father Beckett, when between the two men—and my reminiscences—the story of the tour was finished with those last words of Brian's.