Cinderella in the South Part 5

As for me, I liked country life much, and roughing it a little. I had no particular fear of fever. I compared my physique with Leonard's not without complacency. I thought of the other side, too: the east country that village of all villages, those villagers of all villagers.

But that night I was full of over-seas fervor. I remembered phrases that had rung cut finely at meetings Outpost Duty, the Church in Greater Britain, The White Man's Burden, In Darkest Africa, etc., etc. When I fell asleep there seemed to be a symphony in my ears sounding bra.s.s and tinkling cymbals enough and to spare, but flute-voices of honest pity and sympathy as well.

In the morning I took Leonard's place in his church. We had the English Liturgy again. The thatched dome, with much tinier windows than the windows at home, but much more sun to fill them, seemed a sort of parable to me that morning. After I had finished the rite, I stayed on in the church, and spread out two letters before the Lord, so to speak. One was my schoolmaster's, the other was that one from Cecilia.

It took me half an hour to feel fairly sure of my answer. But I felt very sure then just as sure as I had been the night before but the answer was different.

I thought of my own fold and flock as I read my own friend's letter. How little the loc.u.m tenens seemed to see what I saw in them! I read Cecilia's letter, and compared 'her view of the importance of a country cure with my own. After all, I thought, the latter tended to be an exceptional view in our megalomaniac days. On the other hand, the loc.u.m tenens' view might be rather a normal one, and so might Cecilia's be. Cecilia's scorn, it was, that materially helped the answer to come as clearly as it did.

The thought of a Cecilia reigning in that east-country vicarage seemed no more right than pleasant. It sounds a callous thing to say, but I left my lonely and convalescent friend with something of a sigh of relief, and no real misgiving. I felt troubled about his future certainly, but I saw clearly that I was not meant to take his place. I hoped to find the man who was meant to take it, however.

And, by G.o.d's help, I believe that I really did find him before many months were over.

A cousin of mine Richard East had been persuaded by a certain bishop to accept an urban charge.

I fancy the said bishop had been reared in a rather strait school of enthusiasts, who regarded work in slums as ideally the best sphere for clerics of activity. So he had routed my cousin out of his west-country village, and brought him to a big town--my cousin, who was an outdoor man from his youth. Curiously enough, at Cape Town, there was a letter waiting for me from him.

Wouldn't I tell him something about the 'great s.p.a.ces washed with sun'? The midland town in general seemed not to have gained his affections, though he loved his people one by one. 'I want to clear out,' he wrote, 'for the parish's sake more than for my own, if only I can find the right place to clear to. I'm not a townsman, and I think by now the bishop understands my small-mindedness. I haven't the breadth of a good modern citizen.

I want to go to some Little Peddlington an African village might suit me. No, directly the right man turns up, I don't doubt the bishop will want to put him here in my room. Do you know of anyone likely?' I did know of someone.

I did not write back; I got on my boat and started off for home.

I went down to the east country and set free the loc.u.m tenens.

The village had a bridal look for my eyes; the red-thorn tree was just coming out, the roses would not be long now. I was in time to be at our yearly May games after all. Next day I went to the Midland town and saw my cousin; also, I saw his charge. I tried to look at it with Leonard Reeve's eyes, recalling to my remembrance that delirious night of his. Yes, though it was not South London, it had a drab look on a dull June day. There was a Warwick Arms, if no Surrey Arms. There was a shop with the authentic fragrance only two or three doors off. I knew that bishop, and I found him in, and in a listening mood, on the following day. He wanted to hear about Africa. I described missions and missionaries to him. Then I told him at some length about Leonard Reeve.

'Yes, you have drawn the man convincingly,' he said. 'You didn't invent those touches. I think he's a man after my own heart. I don't understand you people that bury yourselves in little rose-covered, immoral, earthy country villages. But I think I do understand the man that you have described.' I went straight to the point, and spoke of my cousin's parish. He agreed that my cousin was a disappointment. 'He's got the same peddling way of looking at things as you,' he said. 'I thought he'd flourish after transplantation, but I admit he doesn't seem to. Yes, I should think a desert and a barbarous people might suit him. I don't deny that he has vision, but his sense of perspective seems to be rather ridiculous.' I tried to arrange matters there and then after that, but his lords.h.i.+p became politic, and seemed a little afraid that he had said too much to me.

However, the business was on the way to be settled before I parted from him. It has been settled quite a long while now. My cousin, Richard East, now tramps the Kaffir paths and ministers in the hill chapel and in that seven-domed church at the mission station. I do not think that there is any Cecilia in his case, nor that there is likely to be one. He personifies the abstract too pa.s.sionately to need the love of women.

Africa is personified to him the Cinderella of the continents, the drudge with a destiny worthy of her charms and her good-temper.

He is writing a monograph on the Song of Solomon, he tells me. He follows certain scholars in his conjecture that the Shulamite was given back to a humble shepherd by Solomon, when she had conquered the latter by the power of her impa.s.sioned chast.i.ty. But he has his own theory as well that the true lovers were both of African blood, that she came from the Ophir-land south of the Zambesi, and thither returned in peace at last from the foam of perilous seas. Perhaps his argument is slender; but it is good for him to believe in it himself, I think, for surely it helps his work among those that he deems her descendants.

He works on out there, personifying and idealizing. I think he is as much in love with his country parish as I am with mine in England. May we both, in our placid and unfas.h.i.+onable ways, dream our dreams and see our visions! Meanwhile Leonard Reeve reigns in that midland town, and is treasured by the bishop who was not deceived when he expected a kindred spirit. He and Cecilia have chosen a date in this next November for their deferred marriage.

Their choice of month seems to me characteristic. I do not think they will be disappointed if the day is a little urban in its murkiness.

It is good for a man to be in love with his charge, is it not?

Next time some fanatic of West-End work, or East-End work, or foreign mission work gets hold of you and talks excellent sense about discipline, and offering yourself to your bishop, and packing up your kit at a week's notice remember this story of mine!

Is it not well to import something of the precise devotion of Holy Matrimony into the general self-oblation of Holy Orders?

It is good to think that three of us friends have the very same sort of feeling Leonard Reeve for the crowds and the fogs and the odors; my cousin for the rock-sown plains and the little circles of thatched huts; I for the cornlands and the elm-shaded ridges and the cottage people.

Yes, to Leonard anything grimy is just as romantic as green fields to me, or brown veld to my cousin.

Do you know, I was asked to preach Leonard's Inst.i.tution sermon last Whit Monday, and I dared to preach it? Cecilia, who was stately but really pleasant-looking, sat beneath me in the front pew. Leonard, in his stall, looked oppressed with the weight of the ceremony.

But his eyes lighted up, I saw, as I gave out my text. It was from the end of St. John's Gospel. I preached very shortly. I drew for that poor and earnest-looking congregation the picture of a dripping missionary as I had seen him. I told of him going about his business at dawn, cheered by the Easter Feast in front at the chapel on the hill. I pa.s.sed up to it by the cheery camp-fire. I did not forget the smell of breakfast cooking, with its reminder of home afterwards.

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 cla.s.ses, the fog, the scent of the streets.

Then I went higher to the Easter scene, the sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sing 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-wors.h.i.+p, 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.

He dreamed of being a Rhodes scholar years before it came off that Rhodes scholars.h.i.+p of his. It came in the fullness of time a thing of many struggles and prayers, of star-led hopes and paths steep with uphill climbing.

Then at last it was that I agreed to go with him on his yearly pilgrimage, in September, the month of his sailing for home. May used to be a Canterbury month in England, the hawthorn month that p.r.i.c.ked men in their courages and sent them out on the Kentish road. September had been Edgar's pilgrimage month every year a spring month in our southern country. The masasa leaves were taking many tints then in Mashonaland. Speaking generally, the dominant note of our woodland world was rose-color as we tramped together to the station. Matabeleland by contrast seemed rather drab and drouthy, yet she was showing signs of spring. One great rock stood up very beautiful in a pink lichen garment. It was hard by the path that led to the last hill-climb, ere you reached the burial-place. We camped out close beside it, two Mashona boys who had come to seek their fortunes in Bulawayo, and Edgar and I.

When the morning light came I was up. When the sun rose I had all but finished my service. There, on his own ground, so to speak, it seemed easier to pray for the Patron with a sanguine heart, and to give thanks for him with a clear conscience. Over our breakfast we sat on and talked, and looked about us. Edgar seemed to me to be growing in discernment. Once he had seemed so provocatively c.o.c.k-sure about his mighty patron. To pray for him as we had prayed that morning in the language of a race he had contemned might have sounded to him in years past mere clerical impertinence. Now he seemed to suffer me rather gladly.

But he said little. We had scant time to spare just then; there were so many miles to go to the railway. He was to leave for Oxford that very night. While the carriers were cooking their breakfast he came with me to the grave and knelt at the head, looking northwards. I said nothing aloud, nor did he. The rocks bulked dark in the bright air, the hills wore mystic colors, the sun shone pa.s.sionately in a setting of tender blue. Words seemed a presumption just then, too much of a time or nation or age that pa.s.ses. That which may or may not take shape in words remained the untied power of silent prayer. That morning among the many-colored hills I looked to sight the faith that can remove such as these. And I prayed there quietly, in prayer that seemed to need no words, for Edgar. I asked for him that he might see those visions without which! people are apt to perish.

II.

He did not write much, and he did not come for five years. When he came he was not at first communicative. He seemed to take more interest than he used to do in the Mission, I noticed. He had always been a hero among the Mashona boys: that was no new thing.

And I was thankful indeed to see that he had not lost his old artless art of making friends with them. So many things might have conspired to rob him of it. He stayed but a month in all at the Mission, and he said little all that time, but his eyes were full of thought as I talked to him pa.s.sing on to him hopes, disappointments, joys of battle unabating and enhanced. He was a good listener. I did not try to force the pace with him. But for all that I was eager to know his mind. And it seemed a long while waiting and waiting, thinking he might be going to speak day after day. Then at last the time did come for him to speak, but it was after he had left the Mission.

History repeated itself, and we camped in the old place once more. The camp-fire shone out, and the moon rose broad and golden over the grave of pilgrimage. There he lay with his feet to the north on the height above us the founder and name-giver of our State. It was strange how his patronage seemed to dominate us. We said our evensong rather northwards than eastwards; we scanned the northern horizon as though seeking a sign. The wind blew that way as we paced to and fro afterwards, and our thoughts went the way of the wind.

At last I broke the silence. We were resting on a ledge of rock then, smoking, staring away north-wards among the moonlit kopjes.

There he sat beside me, fair-haired and tall, strong and rejoicing in his strength, always courteous but strangely dumb.

He was going to-morrow. Would he go without a revealing word?

'So many worlds, so much to do, So little done, such things to be.'

I paused doubtfully.

He turned to me, and his eyes sparkled as they looked into mine.

'Listen,' he said. Then he told me his heart. Little I knew what it was. I trembled for my crusade, yet not without hope. I had preached to him little, but I had prayed for him much. Now I learned that his heart was as my heart, his desire as my heart's desire, yet, like wine to water, like sunlight to moonlight. I sat at his feet, so to speak, and listened on and on.

III