His wife remembers those days. She was a tall woman and stooped at the doorway thatch: now she cannot rise to it. For every day she went many times to the sweet brook, a quarter of a mile away, rather than take the grey liquor of the pond for her cows. That is how she came to be bent like an oak branch on which children swing, or like a thorn that knows the west wind on the hill or the shore. Now she cannot carry a pail, for it would sweep the ground. She cannot see the apples in autumn until they have fallen to her feet. Her flesh seems to have assumed an animal sweetness, for her bees will cluster on the brown hands. Birds and beasts take to her as to an old tree, though she has pity for them, but no love. Sometimes as she sits at her door the robins come fearlessly close to her—hedge-sparrows, too, if there is nobody else near, and even the partridges that come for the ants in the old dock roots. She watches them with her dull eye and seems easily to have found a Franciscan friendliness when, as if angry with the creatures for seeing her frailty, she stamps her feet and drives them away. Then she relents and tries her power, as if she has half persuaded herself that it is a happy talent. She will crush a mouse in her fingers, and yet they still run over her in their merry business night or day, as they would over a tree that has fallen, and proved fatal to some of them in its death. Yet, in spite of her apparent indifference, I think that she knows the animals more than we who patronise them. Left alone with a cat, she shows, indeed, none of the endearments of a civilised woman, but quietly concedes and demands concessions very much as when a horse and some cows are sheltering from the heat together in a limited shade.
She speaks hardly ever, except with animals. But in church her lips move long after others are tired of “have mercy upon us.”
“Lord!” she says, “you are very kind, but your children are very many. All the sparrows in my garden have to be tended, and I suppose the mice, the moles, the worms, the lizards, the shining things that run and fly and crawl, and all the flowers, trees and birds. Oh! Lord, I had seventeen children and among so many you seemed not to notice some, and they died just anyhow in their happiness, and perhaps then you have forgotten me altogether, and I shall not even be taken away. I have heard that the good shall prosper. You have said it yourself. But I know not what is good or what is prosperity. For what am I? I am willing to learn, yet I am not taught. Am I good? Am I prospering? Lord! what am I to do? There are thousands and thousands of strong and rich and beautiful and happy things in the world, but as for me, I seem to crawl about among them in darkness like a mole. Nevertheless, glory to God the father, Lord of all, though you have done some things that I would not have done, and as to the weather ... but I know not your designs. Glory to the Son though he has long been dead, he was a good man. Glory to the Holy Ghost, which I do believe in, though they say there are no ghosts really. I am a poor old woman, born in Scotland, and a Scotswoman still. My name is Margaret Helen Page, and I live at the Hoath Cottage in the wood, at the end of the lane, where you turn up by ‘The Blue Anchor,’ in going to Horsmonden. There I shall abide and am to be found there, except on Sunday evening in fine weather, when I come to this holy place. Oh, come, Lord, when you have looked after all the sparrows, some day, and take me.”
“If,” she said once, “if God’s a Christian man, I do not know what he means by this weather.”
“I reckon he manages about as well as could be expected in such a funny world,” replied her husband. “Remember old Farmer King who used to swear at the weather so. One day when he had got his hay dry at last and saw it coming on to rain, he picks up a handful and stuffs it into his pocket, and says he will carry that much home dry at any rate, but if he didn’t fall into the brook on his way back and get wet to the skin. Such are the ways of God.”
But she was not convinced, for, with all her feebleness of body and conversation, she proves that man is older than Christ and Buddha, than Jehovah and Jupiter, and that not even such presences on the earth have left behind footpaths in which he can wander in security. She compels us to realise, if we have not done so before, that if we could isolate the child of Christian parents on a solitary island away from all religious influences, he would grow into something curiously different from a Christian, and something marvellously ancient too. Her language, stripped of its tattered and scanty Christianisms, and her acts, without that Sunday journey, reveal the multitude’s eternal paganism, which religions ruffle and sink into again—the paganism of the long-lived, most helpless, proudest and loneliest of animals, contending with winter and bad weather, with accident and disease and strange fears; rejoicing in fine weather, in strength, in the appetites; hating decay; distrusting the inhumanity of the heavens and animals and men from other climates; uncertain, troubled, and thinking little, about the future. For her the world is a flat place, decorated with a pattern of familiar and other fields, with hills, rivers, houses, a sea, a London, a Highland valley of children and old-fashioned ways, and infinitely far off towards the sunset, lands of tigers, monkeys, snakes, strange trees and flowers and men, with earthquakes, volcanoes, huge storms, all lit by sun and moon and stars—and a heaven also and a hell. Very real to her is the snow and the thaw-drip from the roof, the dry heat of summer, the apple blossom, the coming of the swallows, the growth of carrots, potatoes, cabbages and weeds, the coming home of her husband sober or drunk, the use of a few silver coins week by week, the announcement that old Mrs. Fuller is dead or that Mrs. Rixon has another child, the cold at four o’clock on a January morning and the warmth all night in July as she sits sleeping, because of her doubled back, like the corpse of a caveman in his grave, the endlessness of days when she is alone and has nothing to do but to remember and try to remember. She has no hopes, no purposes. I have seen her picking up oak branches in May after the fall of the great trees, and she will go on after her arms are filled, adding to the pile from above, and at the same time losing others from the sides, until at last it is dark and she goes home. Even so she does in life, accumulating memories and affairs, and letting them fall, until the end. Yet it is a little hard that there should be no kindly god or goddess to deceive her and receive her prayers and sanctify her little unnecessary acts, that the very wood at night, round about the house, is merely dark and full of sounds and no home for her. The beautiful Jewish stories told to her by clergymen of some birth and education, though she will gladly listen to them, are little better than ribands for oak faggots—for, though a Pagan, she has no gods. The gods of this part of the earth have long been hurled into Tartarus and bolted there in that grotesque company which the prophets of the ages have gathered together. And so she goes through life, like a child in a many-windowed house, looking on sea and barren land, and full of corridors, resounding and silent by hours, with dim, enormous apartments, bolted doors, and here and there a picture, a skeleton, an old toy, a reminiscent voice....
II
Compared with Margaret Helen Page, her husband, Robert, is a citizen of the world. He knows all the farmers in the neighbourhood, thatching for one, haymaking for another, gardening, woodcutting, washing or pole-pulling in the hop-garden for others. He can even make the beautiful, five-barred gates, with their noble top bars, tapered and shaped like a gun-stock and barrel. All the inns are known to him, and the labourers and wayfaring men who resort to them. He will gossip, and the rich do not disdain to listen to the fabrications and selections which he mixes charmingly for them alone. The workhouse or death is not more than a few years ahead of him, for he stoops with difficulty and will make haste for no man; yet he will cheerfully quarrel with a farmer in the middle of the winter, pick up his coat, take his wages and go off to the inn and drink all that he has; if the farmer grumbles in September that Robert has been taking merely an honest bushel of hops from the pickers he will not give way to the extent of a handful. No one can thatch as he can. His tall haystacks look like churches when they are new, and so they remain. The roofs of his cornricks are shaped like breasts, with convex curves that make the same lines against the sky as you walk round. His vegetable plots are invariably as flat as lawns, their sides evenly sloping to the paths. He stops in the midst of his work and smokes and thinks; and he expects to be paid for his thinking. In the spring he catches moles, hanging them up on the briers or thorns with great care, twisting the twigs round them so that they stay until fur and bone are indistinguishable and break up into dust.
At the inns he hears the gossip of the universe, heaping up as in a marine store the details of murders, swindles, divorces, expensive pictures of Venus, etc., horse races, cricket matches, letters from archbishops and literary men, distant wars, new foods and diseases and cures, automobiles, the cost of rich men’s dinners, how to live happily, the extravagance of the poor, how to feed on a shilling a week. These things are “in print” and therefore true. But he utters no opinion of his own. He consents to exchange his recollections and to accept others; then he sinks into the happy silence of those who have not the gift of ratiocination. What dark, undisturbed depths of personality are his—immense depths yielding to the upper world, now and then, an ejaculation, as Gilbert White’s well yielded a black lizard at times.
“I wonder,” he ejaculated once, “I wonder what God did with himself before he made such a kettle of fish as this world.”